RPM installation message: "error: can't create transaction lock on /"

[Amazator]

Hi all,

I am trying to install the mysql-devel RPM package on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and face a curious error:

"error: can't create transaction lock on /"

I've done a bit of googling on this and the most often recommended measures were to:

(a) make sure I am logged in as "root" (which I am!)
(b) make sure that directory /var/lib/rpm exists (which does!)
(c) make sure that no other package manager program or daemon is active (which I made sure of)
(d) try rebuilding rpm databases (which I can't proceed with due to the same error, in fact!)

I don't know what else could be the reason for this! Would be mighty glad if someone helped me on this.

Regards and thanks in advance,
Chaitanya

 

[mightyscotchpine]

This may not be any help, but whenever I have gotten that error, it's been because I was not root.
Did you log in as root, or su to it?
If you did su, did you also run the root profile with:
su -

good luck

 

[Amazator]

Yes, I am the root user. I log into the system as "root". I've been facing this problem every now and then on RHEL5 only. Does it seem like an RPM core issue?

 

[Amazator]

OK guys, the problem has been busted! The message came because there was no entry for the macro rpmlock_path in /usr/lib/rpm/macros. Added the macro with the value "/var/lib/rpm" and now the mysql-devel rpm installs like a charm! Just posting this here to help you guys later...