Experiments and Arch

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.