Strange issue upgrading from Edgy to Feisty -- or is it an issue?

[Larry Hartman]

> Alright, so I went ahead & let Adept try & update itself. I did not have
> Synaptic already installed, & installing it when my sources.list had
> everything changed to feisty would have been more of a headache than I
> thought it was worth (yes I could have changed everything back to edgy,
> I know, but it didn't seem worth the trouble.) Obviously a mistake --
> what happened was it downloaded everything, installed about half, & then
> gave me the following error message:
>
> There was an error commiting changes. Possibly there was a problem
> downloading some packages or the commit would break packages.

You can try to run "sudo apt-get upgrade" from a terminal to see exactly which 
packages are giving the errors.

> Each time I run adept now this is what happens, & I have no idea why. It
> doesn't need to download anything, but the status bar says some 1408
> packages have been updated, 774 are upgradeable. Is it possible the fact
> that I have some third-party, non-repository software (Stata, to be
> precise) installed is causing this mess? Shouldn't it just leave Stata
> alone? I also have Beryl installed on this machine, from the SVN nightly
> builds, but I disabled all those repositories in my sources.list before
> the upgrade.

Yes, your non-repository software is most likely the culprit here.  Most 
software items that you install manually needs to be aligned with the new 
build structure of Feisty.....for example I download and install the new ATI 
drivers when they are released, each time the Linux kernel is updated I have 
to recompile.

> With much trepidation I rebooted, & thankfully the system still works;
> in Edgy, but it works. For some reason my fonts look tiny and the
> display option seems to be missing in System Settings. Otherwise my
> applications are all here & running.

You mentioned previously that you have your home directory on a separate 
partition.  Do you have your user-generated data archived?  Good opportunity 
to do this now.   Make a list of all the apps you have installed.  Print your 
sources.list file so that you do not forget your third party repositories.  
You also should download and burn the Feisty ISO from the website.  If you 
proceed any further and your system becomes unusable you will want to be able 
to pop the CD in and load Feisty from scratch, and then reload your third 
party apps afterwards.

I hesitate to tell you this next part, because in my mind it is a very big 
gamble with 700+ packages outstanding.  To fix broken dependencies on a 
previously attempted install you can also type "sudo apt-get -f install" in 
the terminal window.  It has worked for me in the past on much smaller 
amounts of broken dependencies.  However, I would wait a couple of days 
before running this command to let others on this list respond with a 
hopefully better solution.  Howard Coles?



Larry