Ubuntu 9.10 repeated dialogue: "Ubuntu is running in low-graphics mode"

[Markus Schönhaber]

08.12.2009 05:05, Leonard Chatagnier:

> I agree you may have to change sources.list and I know it's not the 
> recommended/approved
> method.  I only disagree that safe-upgrade wont do the same regarding 
> depends.

And that's not correct. 'safe-upgrade' and 'dist-upgrade' are different.
Only if 'safe-upgrade' will not keep back packages both will effectively
do the same.

> I just ran
> sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude safe-upgrade with these results:
[...]

On Karmic there is indeed no dependency conflict, so 'safe-upgrade'
won't keep back packages, so it will do the same as
'full-upgrade'/'dist-upgrade' *in this case*.

OTOH, on Hardy you'd see this:

~# LANG=C aptitude -s safe-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
Building tag database... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
  bind9-host dnsutils libbind9-30 libdns35 libisc35 libisccfg30
liblwres30 linux-image-server linux-server
The following packages will be upgraded:
  libisccc30 linux-libc-dev
2 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 9 not upgraded.
Need to get 733kB of archives. After unpacking 0B will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] n
Abort.

But...

~# LANG=C aptitude -s dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
Building tag database... Done
The following NEW packages will be automatically installed:
  libdns36
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libdns36 linux-image-2.6.24-26-server
linux-ubuntu-modules-2.6.24-26-server
The following packages will be upgraded:
  bind9-host dnsutils libbind9-30 libdns35 libisc35 libisccc30
libisccfg30 liblwres30 linux-image-server linux-libc-dev linux-server
11 packages upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 25.3MB of archives. After unpacking 109MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] n
Abort.

> I haven't actually did the upgrade yet but do I not have what you say 
> that today's update to bind is such a case? AAMOF, I rarely use 
> dist-upgrade.  I don't know
> all the facts about aptitude but are you implying that upgrade didn't 
> get the hits for you on the bind upgrade and if so did you try 
> safe-upgrade? Maybe safe-
> upgrade does what dist-upgrade is said
> to do.

No. Just look at aptitude's man page:

|  safe-upgrade
|      Upgrades installed packages to their most recent version.
|      Installed packages will not be removed unless they are unused
|      (see the section “Managing Automatically Installed Packages”
|      in the aptitude reference manual). Packages which are not
|      currently installed may be installed to resolve dependencies
|      unless the --no-new-installs command-line option is supplied.
|
|      It is sometimes necessary to remove one package in order to
|      upgrade another; this command is not able to upgrade packages
|      in such situations. Use the full-upgrade command to upgrade as
|      many packages as possible.
|
|  full-upgrade
|      Upgrades installed packages to their most recent version,
|      removing or installing packages as necessary. This command is
|      less conservative than safe-upgrade and thus more likely to
|      perform unwanted actions. However, it is capable of upgrading
|      packages that safe-upgrade cannot upgrade.
|
|          Note
|          This command was originally named dist-upgrade for
|          historical reasons, and aptitude still recognizes
|          dist-upgrade as a synonym for full-upgrade.

-- 
Regards
  mks