[ILUG] My Dapper story

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Thu, 01 Jun 2006, FRLinux wrote:

> I am wondering how come you managed to just destroy your system so
> badly ... We have a variety of Ubuntu systems (and i also have 2 at
> home) which have been installed from breezy or dapper from alpha to rc
> and the worst i managed to do was to break GDM login (cannot find
> gnome-session although it is there as i can type it in the default
> xterm).

I hit a bit of a problem myself.  I changed my sourcesfrom breezy to
dapper, then did 'apt-get upgrade' with the intention of then doing
dist-upgrade.  Not sure if this might have been my mistake.  However, at
some point in the upgrade, the machine froze entirely.  

I had to use <alt><sysrq>-b to reset it and it froze again on boot.  This
time I could see that it was freezing on "starting pcmcia" (this machine
doesn't have pcmcia).  So I booted a knoppix cd and disabled that service
at which point I was able to boot into a somewhat broken ubuntu system (no
X server, etc).

I ran 'dpkg --configure -a' and it fell over again trying to configure
pcmcia support.  I reset again and removed the pcmcia support along with
the gnome-bluetooth stuff which was depending on it.  'dpkg --configure -a'
then completed, as did 'apt-get upgrade' and finally 'apt-get
dist-upgrade'.

A couple of other obscure packages gave small trouble, seemingly due to
being interrupted but I just removed them and let them install again.

I have to say it was not a smooth upgrade.  Perhaps if I was just using
officially supported packages I wouldn't have had these issues.

> Debian is hard to break, real hard if you ask me.

Agreed, though this sort of recovery is really not something an ordinary
user would do.  I guess if another system froze in the midst of a big
upgrade, it would be quite hard to recover.  

Gavin