Uninstalled Ncurses!

[splufdaddy]

I was trying to install a program today that said it required ncurses. I updated ncurses, and still no luck. I was going to try uninstalling and then re-installing ncurses, but my machine is now paralyzed without ncurses. I cant open yum or even ftp from a command line because of various errors. My desktop is pretty bare as all of the icons have either disappeared or been reduced to a generic icon.

The one plus I have going for me is that webmin is still functioning. I tried going to the "install package" section of webmin and I attempted to install ncurses from this link, but webmin tells me that's not a valid RPM file.

Can anyone help me re-install ncurses? When that's re-installed, will all of my other programs be back?

 

[splufdaddy]

Ok, here's an update. I booted to the disk and told it to update, and saw that ncurses was being installed, so that was promising. However, now when I boot it says that no inittab file was found and it asks me for a runlevel. I've entered 0-5 and single, and each time it says that there are no more processes running at this level, and I have to reboot the machine. Any suggestions would be most welcome!

 

[splufdaddy]

More progress, and different problems, in case anyone is keeping track:

While in rescue mode, I saw that I didn't have an etc/inittab file, but I had an inittab.rpmsave, so I copied the .rpmsave to inittab. It booted, but the default was runlevel 5 and prefdm wasn't loading and causing problems. So I changed to runlevel 3 and I get a login screen that says

(none) login:

No usernames work, it doesn't even prompt me for a password. It seems like I'm close, what do I do to be able to login?

 

[WhiteVolg]

Ow, It sounds as if a great deal of your system was thrashed by the 'update'. You will probably have to boot back in rescue mode, fsck and mount your root partition. Execute the following:

for I in `find /etc -name \*.rpmsave |sed 's/\.rpmsave\/'`;do cp ${I}.rpmsave $I;done


and try a reboot. with luck, it will work, otherwise I highly recommend a full reinstall as the majority of your configuration is likely destroyed and will take days to rebuild.

Sorry to have to bear the bad news.