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

[Howard Coles]

On 4/27/07, Larry Hartman <larryhartman50 at bellsouth.net> wrote:
> > 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?

Well, at this point I would go out of my way to install synaptic.  It
would be the easiest tool to use to isolate what's causing the
conflicts.  I just seem to have very good results from using it in
these kinds of situations.

Oh, and installing Synaptic would have been very easy even after the
sources.list file was modified.  I did this on one machine because I
sort of had a hunch it was going to cause me trouble.  (it had in the
past).  Basically all that would have done is upgrade any package
synaptic depends on.  The only problem you may have experienced would
have been the missing font syndrome.  Where all the letters in the
words in Synaptic's interface show up as boxes instead of letters.
But, you always have the fall back.

Another way to get around this problem is to pick one or two of the
apps that are held back and just do "sudo apt-get install <app-name>,
<app2-name>, . . . "  (replacing <app-name> with the app(s) you
picked.  Oddly enough you'd get more info as to why those apps are
being held back, and would have a better shot at correcting the
problem if you couldn't get a graphical front end to work.

-- 
See Ya'
Howard Coles Jr.
John 3:16!