Upgrade problem caused by many mistakes and broken packages.

[Bastiaan Gijsbertus Roufs]

Upgrade problem caused by many mistakes and broken packages.

Hello Everybody.

Only a few weeks ago, I installed Kubuntu 22.04.1 LTS at my Lenovo 
Thinkpad X230 i5, 4GB RAM and 250 GB SSD at present. In a few weeks from 
now, I'll go to a computer repair shop that will add an extra SSD of 1 
GB and 2 DDR 3, 1600 Mhz memory banks - with a view to getting 16 GB RAM.

My idea was the following....

STEP 1.
Prepare a system with the all the packages and languages modules I need 
for 10 languages - spell and grammar check, etc.

STEP 2.
Upgrade from Kubuntu 22.04.4 LTS to Kubuntu 24.04 LTS.

STEP 3.
Prepare a data only backup via Backintime or Luckybackup.

STEP 3A.
Prepare a system backup via Timeshift. However, this is too complicated 
for now - I'll start using Timeshift after getting the new 1 TB SSD. The 
old 250 GB SSD, I want to use for the Timeshift system-backup. My 
practice experience makes me clear that Timeshift is NOT good for 
migration from one disk or one laptop to another.

STEP 3B.
Prepare migration from the smaller to the bigger SSD: via a compressed 
CloneZilla ISO image of the whole SSD at a Ventoy USB. Like this, I 
wanted to port all the packages, language modules, etc. to the bigger, 
new SSD.

STEP 3C.
After getting the new SSD and RAM memory.... Installing the whole system 
and all data from the CloneZilla ISO.

COMPLICATIONS EVER SINCE YESTERDAY, THURSDAY 25-04-2024.
After installing Backintime, for the data only backup, the system does 
not 'see' anymore my 4 TB external hard disks, formatted in EXT4. Also a 
2 TB USB stick formatted in FAT32 can not be used any more. Note - I am 
using USB 3.0 ports.....
So, I uninstalled again Backintime. And I copied some temporal data 
backups to Wetransfer.

Yesterday, Kubuntu 24.04 LTS has been released. However, I do not manage 
to upgrade to it. That's why, I did several attempts to upgrade to 
Kubuntu 23.10, prior to upgrading to the newest LTS version. However, 
because of my ppa backports, I was not able to do an upgrade.
So, I have removed the backports and also Flatpak - via the package 
managers at my system.

However, those efforts did not help. Several attempts to upgrade to 
23.10 ended up like this:

«(...)
bas at Camino:~$ sudo do-release-upgrade -m desktop
Checking for a new Ubuntu release
ERROR:root:getting the encoding failed
Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/DistUpgrade/DistUpgradeView.py", 
line 39, in <module>
     locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, "")
   File "/usr/lib/python3.10/locale.py", line 620, in setlocale
     return _setlocale(category, locale)
locale.Error: unsupported locale setting

= Welcome to Ubuntu 23.10 'Mantic Minotaur' =

The Ubuntu team is proud to announce Ubuntu 23.10 'Mantic Minotaur'.

(...ETC.....)

Could not determine the upgrade

An unresolvable problem occurred while calculating the upgrade.

If none of this applies, then please report this bug using the
command 'ubuntu-bug ubuntu-release-upgrader-core' in a terminal. If
you want to investigate this yourself the log files in
'/var/log/dist-upgrade' will contain details about the upgrade.
Specifically, look at 'main.log' and 'apt.log'.


Restoring original system state

Aborting
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
bas at Camino:~$
(...)»

I have been checking main.log and apt.log as well as some other logs in 
'/var/log/dist-upgrade'
Main problem - too many broken packages and depencies.

Now, I am considering two options:

OPTION 1.
Trying to use the Kubuntu 22.04.4 LTS ISO at my Ventoy stick to fix the 
many broken packages.

OPTION 2.
Downloading the Kubuntu 24.04 LTS ISO and putting it at the same Ventoy 
stick, after which I fresh-install this new LTS.

About option 1 - is there a simple and quick way to fix the broken 
packages? If not, I take recourse to option 2.

If you are interested, I can provide you with a few long error reports 
of '/var/log/dist-upgrade' - notable main.log and apt.log.

Yours.

Bas.




-- 
====
Bas G. Roufs MA
Rijksweg 66a
NL-6585 AG Mook
+31 6 446 835 10
BasRoufs at gmail.com

Mook ligt ca. 10 km. ten zuiden van Nijmegen en 10 km. ten oosten van de Duitse grens.
Uitspraak -ou- in achternaam «Roufs»: zoals in «bouwen».

Mook is about 10 km. south of Nijmegen and 10 km west of the German border.
Pronunciatiation -ou- family name «Roufs»: like in «about».