RPM package verification

This post doesn't solve any problems, but is more of a record of the investigation to solve one.

I'm having problems with Fedora Core 4 GUI. Rather unpredictible X behaviour, with not being able to restart it, inability to start just some of the applications, such as xterm or firefox...

Handling X has always been my achilles heal. I resisted windows, of any description ;-), for as long as I could, initially regarding it first as pure waste, then unnecessary nicety. It's only relatively recently that I kind of resigned to the fact that resources are now robust enough to cope, and there exist applications that could not live without GUI.

Anyway, still don't really know what the problem is, but done some googling, and can see that I'm not the only one struggling with this strange GUI behaviour. Somebody suggested verifying X server packages - good idea. Run the rpm --verify on all packages to do with xorg, and got some result:

# rpm -V $(rpm -qa | grep xorg)
. . ? . . . . . c /etc/security/console.apps/xserver
S . 5 . . . . T /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/libvgahw.a

So why post this? Well, mostly to document the result, and to make a record of the file attribute characters.

The eight characters mean differences in:
S - size
M - file type or permissions (mode)
5 - MD5 checksum
D - major/minor device number
L - access path (read-link)
U - user (owner)
G - group
T - mtime stamp (modification time)

Between attribute characters and the file name, the file's type (as in "purpose") may be listed. In my output I got 'c' - a configuration file.


All I know now, that the checksum on the xserver file cannot be verified and that the module archive file has a different size, mtime and checksum (considering what type of file it is - hardly surprising).

So, have I learned anything - not really, but it gave me a chance to experiment with verifying packages ;-)