Today's proposed updates for 10.04 LTS and 10.10 pulled in wrong linux kernel

[Chuck Peters]

On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 9:08 AM, Martin Pitt <martin.pitt at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> Hello Ubuntu developers,
>
> Today we released another round of Linux kernel updates to
> lucid/maverick/natty-proposed. However, the proposed natty update
> (2.6.38 based kernel) was accidentally copied to lucid-proposed and
> maverick-proposed, and thus had been on the master archive.ubuntu.com
> between 09:00 and 14:00 UTC.
>
> That means, if you have proposed updates enabled on your 10.04 LTS
> (lucid) or 10.10 (maverick) Ubuntu installation, and did a system
> upgrade during that time, it might have pulled in the 2.6.38 kernel.
>
> To check this, please run
>
>  dpkg -l linux* | grep '^ii.*2.6.38'
>
> If you have any results, please first run another system upgrade,
> which will again pull in the 2.6.32 (lucid) or 2.6.35 (maverick)
> kernels, and then remove the wrong kernel packages with
>
>  sudo apt-get purge `dpkg -l linux* | grep '^ii.*2.6.38' | awk '{print $2}'`
>
> I fixed the script that handles the proposed kernel packages now, so
> this won't happen again.
>
> I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience that this caused!
>
> Martin Pitt
> --
> Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
> Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
>
> ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list
> ubuntu-devel-announce at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-announce

Some of you are not on the devel-announce list and the above instructions
won't quite fix all situations.  For example on a Intel P4 machine with an
older Nvidia graphics card the apt-get command wants to remove the nvidia
driver as well as other packages.


root at p4:~# apt-get purge `dpkg -l linux* | grep '^ii.*2.6.38' | awk
'{print $2}'`
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  build-essential* comerr-dev* g++* g++-4.4* krb5-multidev* libc6-dev*
  libgcrypt11-dev* libgnutls-dev* libkrb5-dev* libmysqlclient-dev*
  libpam0g-dev* libpcre3-dev* libpq-dev* libsasl2-dev* libsqlite3-dev*
  libssl-dev* libstdc++6-4.4-dev* libtool* libxml2-dev* linux* linux-generic*
  linux-headers-2.6.38-10* linux-headers-2.6.38-10-generic*
  linux-headers-generic* linux-image* linux-image-2.6.38-10-generic*
  linux-image-generic* linux-libc-dev* nvidia-173* nvidia-glx-173* zlib1g-dev*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 31 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 314MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? n
Abort.

After a little problem solving I found the nvidia and other packages depended
on the linux-libc-dev package.

So here is how I solved it.  Simply remove everything as described above
except the linux-libc-dev package.  Then download the dev package manually
and install it.  In this case I went to http://packages.ubuntu.com and
found the package by searching for linux-libc-dev in the lucid
distribution. Then reinstall the meta packages.

This is what the original command selected for packages.
root at p4:~# dpkg -l linux* | grep '^ii.*2.6.38' | awk '{print $2}'
linux
linux-generic
linux-headers-2.6.38-10
linux-headers-2.6.38-10-generic
linux-headers-generic
linux-image
linux-image-2.6.38-10-generic
linux-image-generic
linux-libc-dev

root at p4:~# cd /tmp
root at p4:/tmp# wget
http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/l/linux/linux-libc-dev_2.6.32-32.62_i386.deb

Here I removed the one package from the list.
root at p4:/tmp# apt-get purge `dpkg -l |grep linux | grep '^ii.*2.6.38'
| awk '{print $2}'|grep -v linux-libc-dev`
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  linux* linux-generic* linux-headers-2.6.38-10*
  linux-headers-2.6.38-10-generic* linux-headers-generic* linux-image*
  linux-image-2.6.38-10-generic* linux-image-generic*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 8 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 211MB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
...

root at p4:/tmp# dpkg -i linux-libc-dev_2.6.32-32.62_i386.deb
...
root at p4:/tmp# apt-get update
root at p4:/tmp# apt-get install linux linux-generic
linux-headers-generic linux-image linux-image-generic
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
  linux-headers-2.6.32-33 linux-headers-2.6.32-33-generic
  linux-image-2.6.32-33-generic
Suggested packages:
  fdutils linux-doc-2.6.32 linux-source-2.6.32 linux-tools
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  linux linux-generic linux-headers-2.6.32-33 linux-headers-2.6.32-33-generic
  linux-headers-generic linux-image linux-image-2.6.32-33-generic
  linux-image-generic
0 upgraded, 8 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
Need to get 42.3MB of archives.
After this operation, 185MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
...

Reboot and problem solved!  Next time a kernel update is available it will
be pulled in by the meta packages linux linux-generic
linux-headers-generic linux-image linux-image-generic.



Chuck