[Bug 1573160] Re: [Mac hardware] package fwupdate 0.5-2ubuntu4 failed to install/upgrade: subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1

[Alexander Bethke]

I think the problem is that on Macs, EFI partitions are generally
expected to be formatted in the HFS+ file system. The default EFI
partition is HFS+ and even if you create a second one, you will often
need to that as the HFS+ file system as well to work around
peculiarities with the Mac firmware.

In Linux, HFS+ partitions (at least with journalling enabled) get
mounted read-only by default. You can force them to mount read-write,
but if you have journalling enabled that is possibly harmful for your
EFI partition, which ultimately could render your system to be unable to
boot, requiring you to fix it manually. If you really want to toy around
with that, you should really make an backup image of your EFI partition
and make sure you know and test how to recover it.

I have had bad experiences with Linux writing to HFS+ partitions even
when journalling was turned off. Also, the firmware update tool will
very likely do no good on Mac hardware at all. So I decided to remove
the fwupdate package. This fixes the immediate problem and since I have
not had problems with GRUB during the years of running Ubuntu on this
machine, I hope I'm fine that way.

That said, it's not a great experience for a common problem with running
Ubuntu on Mac hardware. Maybe this could be worked around by excluding
the fwupdate package on Ubuntu installations on Mac hardware
automatically. I acknowledge though that the real problem runs deeper
and is very hard for Ubuntu to fix.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1573160

Title:
  [Mac hardware] package fwupdate 0.5-2ubuntu4 failed to
  install/upgrade: subprocess installed post-installation script
  returned error exit status 1

Status in fwupdate package in Ubuntu:
  Won't Fix

Bug description:
  I am not sure what I was doing when this problem occurred

  ProblemType: Package
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04
  Package: fwupdate 0.5-2ubuntu4
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.4.0-21.37-generic 4.4.6
  Uname: Linux 4.4.0-21-generic x86_64
  ApportVersion: 2.20.1-0ubuntu2
  Architecture: amd64
  Date: Tue Apr 19 12:29:57 2016
  ErrorMessage: subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
  RelatedPackageVersions:
   dpkg 1.18.4ubuntu1
   apt  1.2.10ubuntu1
  SourcePackage: fwupdate
  Title: package fwupdate 0.5-2ubuntu4 failed to install/upgrade: subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
  UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to xenial on 2016-04-19 (1 days ago)

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