Experiments and Arch
Experiments and Arch
Suyash Singh
Posted by Suyash Singh
on May 17, 2014
Photo by Emily on Unsplash

Arch needs you to be clear about the things you are doing with it. One wrong step and KABOOM!

An app bugged me with this error:error while loading shared libraries:

libssl.so.0.9.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Simple, not a big deal. I said to myself. Let’s see what version of libssl I have:

$ ls /usr/lib/ | grep 'libssl'
libssl3.so libssl.so libssl.so.1.0.0

Ahaa! What if a 0.9.8 symlink works (if not for the breaking changes)?

 $ cd /usr/lib
 $ ln -s libssl.so.0.9.8 libssl.so.1.0.0
 $ ls | grep 'libssl'
 libssl3.so libssl.so libssl.so.0.9.8 libssl.so.1.0.0

But, It didn’t work! So, let’s delete this useless symlink.

sudo rm libssl.so.1.0.0

Oh no! Not this! I deleted the wrong file! I knew that I’d done something wrong, I couldn’t sudo anything.

error while loading shared libraries: 
libssl.so.1.0.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.

No problem, let’s just reinstall the package and everything will be fine. Pacman didn’t work either, now that’s funny! Trapped? Let’s analyze the situation: sudo and pacman are both not working. All I need is the libssl.so.1.0.0 file back again, what If I can get it from the openssl package.

Things became even worse, the laptop battery died. I came to know that I had taken the charger off for some stupid reason I had no idea about.

Take a deep breathe. Relax. I put the laptop on charging, powered it on but, it didn’t work! Oops! Something went wrong.

Flashed the usb stick with ubuntu, downloaded the package, copied the file into /usr/lib/, and then finally deleted the symlink, finally!

Arch came back to life. /usr/lib/ is a dangerous place.