Upgrade Borked System

[dhenzler]

I've always used BASH. Started in 1988 on Solaris 8

[Powerwagon77]

I thought that csh and ksh were the main shells Solaris folks used. I'd love to learn them, but bash has been the default on everything I've used in earnest until now.

[dhenzler]

IMHO if a system NEEDS you to use a particular shell... it should tell you when you attempt to use another.

[dhenzler]

So is there one shell that reigns supreme ?

[frogprince]

Powerwagon: I really appreciate your time and attention to this issue, but I'm still getting error messages. I changed "foreach" to "for each", but this time I got:

for each i (`cat /tmp/sad-packages.txt`)
Badly placed ()'s
echo " "

echo $i
i: undefined variable
pkg install -fy $i
i: undefined variable
end

[Powerwagon77]

I'm glad to help. I hope that I am actually helping. "foreach" is what you need if you are using the default root shell, csh, which, I guess is actually tcsh. To find out what shell you are using, once you are the root user, because it can change, type:

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echo $SHELL

CSH
If it returns '/bin/csh' then follow the instructions, exactly, here: https://forums.ghostbsd.org/viewtopic.p ... t=20#p6050
BASH
If if says '/usr/local/bin/bash' then do these in order, one line at a time:

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pkg update -f

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pkg check -d

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pkg check -s 2>&1 | cut -d: -f1 |grep -v Checking |uniq > /tmp/sad-packages.txt

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for i in `cat /tmp/sad-packages.txt`; do echo -e "\n $i";pkg install -fy $i; done

If it says anything else beside those 2:
1. choose one, bash or csh
2. become root if you aren't
3. type the shell name ('bash' or 'csh')
4. follow the directions for the shell you chose

Hopefully that distils things down.

@dhenzler : There are quite a few guys I've met that prefer those shells. They are pretty smart and I just assume that there is a good reason for it. I'm talking about the quality of people that write could machine learning AI in 'awk'

[frogprince]

So, at the end of my efforts above, Update Station told me that there were updates. So I updated, rebooted, and tried again. All was the same. So I uninstalled and reinstalled Clementine, mate-terminal, and Firefox. Clementine now works, so that's progress. But mate-terminal will not; when I try to invoke it from Xterm, I get:

>mate-terminal
mate-terminal terminated by signal SIGSEGV (Address boundary error)

Firefox still gives me a plain black window without the URL window. So I opened /usr/local/bin, and clicked on "firefox".
I got an immediate error message stating:

There is no application installed for "shared library" files.

Trying to open it from a terminal yields:

>/usr/local/bin/firefox
Javascript error: chrome://global/content/browser-child.js, line 352: NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE: [nsIWebNavigation.loadURIWithOptions]

Somehow, I'm not getting the installation packages I need for these software applications from the repository. ?????

[Powerwagon77]

Would you mind sharing some of your info? If you can run this command, it'll pump out all your installed packages to a file.

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pkg info > my-installed-packages.txt

It should work for any shell. Either attach it to your post, which is easier, or copy/paste the contents which may not work depending now many characters are allowed.

[frogprince]

So..I'm embarrassed, but maybe this will help someone else. My problem turned out to be hardware. When i tried to reboot to provide Powerwagon with my package information, the system wouldn't boot correctly: wrong desktop background, no toolbar, wiggling icons. I bought and installed a PNY SSD, reinstalled Ghost, ran through all the updates, and now things are fine again. I'm curious why fsck didn't note any problems on that drive; that was the first thing I tried. And the HD was only about six months old, and never had anything but Ghost on it. No more Toshiba drives for me!

Thank you, Powerwagon and Eric, for all your time and trouble. Right now I'm good to go.