Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 65117
Kernel-2.4.18-4 RPM "fatal error: unable to find a suitable template"
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:42:38 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.2.1) Gecko/20010901 Description of problem: Fresh install of RedHat 7.3, on a 450MHz AMD system. Installing errata kernel upgrade to kernel-2.4.18-4.i386.rpm succeeds (as far as I can tell), but generates error message "fatal error: unable to find a suitable template" before exiting. This really doesn't seem to be a kernel bug per se; more probably a kernel RPM glitch. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.4.18-4.i386.rpm How reproducible: Didn't try Steps to Reproduce: 1. Fresh install of RedHat 7.3, standard Workstation, English. 2. Download errata for RedHat 7.3 3. Install kernel upgrade: rpm -UvhF kernel-2.4.18-4.i386.rpm Actual Results: Kernel upgrade installs properly. However, rpm generates error message "fatal error: unable to find a suitable template" before exiting. Expected Results: Critical operation like kernel upgrade should not mention "fatal errors", even if it actually succeeds. Additional info: Haven't had time to try to duplicate this, or to dig into the kernel spec file. Timing of error message suggests to me that it could be thrown by some line in the post-install section. I have no clue what a "suitable template" could be in this particular context, or why it would not be found. This seems low priority, as I don't see any reports of anyone else having a similar problem, and it doesn't seem to have actually broken anything. But I've never seen that particular error message in dozens of other RedHat installations, and I was pretty miffed to have it pop up in my very first RedHat 7.3 install on my personal machine at home.
this message seems to come from grubby (part of mkinitrd)
yep, definitely -- could you let us see your grub.conf?
Created attachment 58244 [details] grub.conf
Very interesting. I do not use grub, I am a lilo kind of guy. I've really never looked into grub's configuration before. I think I see where this error is coming from, now. My system has multiple installations of Linux distros. After I allow RedHat to do a fresh install on a subset of the partitions, I tar up the contents of /boot, and move them over to a dedicated boot partition. This has never been a problem in the past, but I see that grub.conf cares a great deal about the precise partitions and paths related to /boot. I'm attaching my anaconda-generated grub.conf file, which contains outdated information. If, as a LILO user, I do not wish to maintain a separate set of grub configuration files, how can I eliminate "fatal error" messages during kernel upgrades?
erase /boot/grub/grub.conf; that should fix the problem for good. as long as you use lilo, you don't need it anyway.