I I finally set about upgrading my home server1 from Dapper to Hardy yesterday. I had been hoping for a less traumatic experience then upgrading my desktop computer from Dapper to Gusty2. Unfortunately I once again ran into problems. First off, it’s been nearly a week since Hardy was officially released but when I tried to run the official upgrade tools they all initially told me I was running the latest version. According to the documentation, I should have been able to run either sudo do-release-upgrade
or sudo update-manager
but neither worked. I was only able to start the upgrade process by running sudo update-manager -d
and my understanding is that “-d” tells the program to grab the latest development version. Weird, but oh well. Then the process just dragged on and on and on and on and on…. I eventually went to bed leaving it running. The only reason I stayed up as late as I did with it was the excellent book I was reading.
When I got up this morning, it was still running but was hung up on a question I needed to answer. I clicked through the question and a few more before heading off to work. When I got home, again the upgrade was hung up on a question. I worked my way through answering all the questions and let the upgrader do its job. Unfortunately the upgrader eventually failed on these packages: gnome-applets-data, gnome-applets, ubuntu-desktop and update-manager. I clicked through the errors and then the upgrader said:
Could not install the upgrades
The upgrade aborts now. Your system could be in an unusable state. A recovery will run now (dpkg –configure -a).
I clicked ok to the error, something flashed up and then the upgrader died/vanished/went away. I tried running:
sudo aptitude update
but it sat there for far too long for my sleep deprived and impatient self.sudo aptitude upgrade
, only it said there wasn’t anything to upgrade.sudo aptitude autoclean, *shrug* it's part of my standard script for updating my systems.
sudo aptitude dist-upgrade
, only it said there wasn’t anything to upgrade.sudo dpkg --configure -a
, it said there were unconfigured packages but it couldn’t fix them automagically. It mostly complained about gnome-applets-data.
I ended up running sudo aptitude install gnome-applets-data gnome-applets ubuntu-desktop update-manager
and that fixed up those errors no problem. For giggles of insanity I tried running sudo aptitude -s -f install
to see what else might be left to update3. It found another 111 packages it wanted to remove but some of them I want to keep, so I’ll have to look into that more closely. Most likely all these errors were caused by my own foolishness, as at one point I was testing some stuff out on the machine and enabled some 3rd party repositories to install unsupported apps. *blech* I don’t think I’ll be doing that again. I was able to reboot the machine and connect to it via SSH and SMB, but HTTP seems to be broken at the moment. *bugger* Apache is one of the packages sudo aptitude -s -f install
wanted to remove. I guess looking into that just got bumped up my priority list.
1 An old Dell Dimension desktop with a PII-400 CPU and 256 MB of RAM.
2 Never fear, Fritz (my desktop PC) is next on my list of machines to upgrade.
3 More accurately, I found some instructions when upgrading my desktop from Dapper to Gusty that recommended doing that to ensure all apps got updated.