Local or Obsolete packages and upgrading Ubuntu

[Colin Law]

On 22 February 2013 15:46, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 22 February 2013 14:01, Colin Law <clanlaw at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> I am preparing to upgrade my Quantal system to Raring and following
>> the suggestions in [1] I have opened Synaptic Package Manager, clicked
>> on Status and selected Installed (local or obsolete) and expected to
>> see a short list of stuff I had installed from downloaded debs etc.
>> Instead I see a long list of packages including, for example
>> libcamel-1.2-33, libcamel-1.2-39, libcupsdriver1, libpoppler26, proj,
>> ubuntuone-installer, ubuntuone-control-panel-common and many more.
>>
>> Does anyone know how these might have got there and whether I can
>> safely remove them?
>>
>> Colin
>>
>> [1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CleanUpgrade
>
> If you really want to go to an unfinished beta, I'd strongly suggest a
> clean install into a new partition and just share your existing /home
> partition. That's what I do. You keep all your desktop customisations
> but you do not endanger your current system.

Oh ye of little faith in the Great God Ubuntu who will never let you
down provided you Believe in Him.

I have the luxury that, being retired, this is all just a hobby for me
and if things get messed up then it just adds to the challenge and
helps to prevent (or at least delays) atrophy of the brain.
Everything important is backed up of course (on disk that is, not the
brain, unfortunately).

I uninstalled the packages that synaptic thought should not be there
in the first place, purged all the ppas and

sudo sed -i 's/quantal/raring/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo update && sudo dist-upgrade

Rebooted and everything seems to be working except
squid-deb-proxy-client so I have disabled that for the moment while I
determine whether anything else is giving problems.

I see one other malfunction, in System Settings > Mouse & Touchpad I
have the General and Touchpad sections but the Mouse section with
Mouse Pointer Speed is entirely missing.

I would still like to know how those packages got installed in the
first place however.  A number of them seemed to be to do with
Evolution so I wonder whether an Evolution upgrade at some point left
orphan packages lying about.  I did install 12.10 in August while it
was still pre-release so that may be the cause.  Autoremove did not
see them however.

Colin

>
> However, if you are determined to do an upgrade, then there is little
> you can do to remove extras. The simplest way is:
>
> sudo -s
> apt-get update
> apt-get dist-upgrade -y
> apt-get clean
> apt-get autoclean
> apt-get autoremove -y
> apt-get purge
>
> This makes sure you're up to date, empties the package caches, removes
> any packages you have that nothing else depends upon, and removes any
> lingering config files from no-longer-installed packages.
>
>
> --
> Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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