Redhat 9's great, RPM not so

[Robert E. Raymond]

Hi all

I finally gave up on Gentoo for my pianist's computer today and 
installed Redhat 9.  It's currently reminding me why I don't use an RPM 
based distro myself, though it is pretty nice and once I get a few 
things fixed it will be great for my pianist (for one he needs a GUI for 
just about everything and Gentoo doesn't provide that).

Here's the issue:  It's with RPM-

Any time I do anything RPM related (be it installing a new one, running 
rpmdb --initdb gives it too (thought that might be the issue, but I've 
not used RPM in at least a year)) I get this: (this one specifically 
from rpmdb --initdb)

rpmdb: unable to join the environment
error: db4 error(11) from dbenv->open: Resource temporarily unavailable
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 - Resource temporarily 
unavailable (11)

Similar stuff occurs when I'm trying to install an RPM.

This is an SGI-installer based Redhat 9, no updates, etc. (partly 
because the system is currently modemless due to the many recent 
thunderstorms).  Any ideas of what I could do to fix RPM?


             TIA

             Bob Raymond