LMDE Cinnamon fails during upgrade of initramfs-tools

[Ayke]

I downloaded and installed LMDE Cinnamon, this release:
http://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=102
I installed all upgrades, via the graphical installer, from update pack 6 to update pack 7.
During upgrade, initramfs-tools fails to install. I don't remember the exact path, but I do know it has to do with libpango1.0-0.

This only happens with the Cinnamon version (only tested the 64bit version), the Mate version works well (except for a few unrelated bugs that are also in the Cinnamon version - it wanted to replace /etc/issue with a Debian version and thought it was modified by hand).

I have tried this about three times, the last time only doing a clean install and immediately upgrading with the graphical update manager. Every time it failed at that specific package problem (sometimes other problems happened before but I could get past those). It seems like packages are somehow not installed in the right order or something like that (but reinstalling libpango1.0-0 did not resolve the issue). Apt/dpkg said there were a lot dependency issues during upgrade and I remember dpkg once saying something like 'your installation is probably broken'. So, it seems to happen every time. Reinstalling LMDE on the USB stick with unetbootin also did not do the trick (the installation itself went well the 2nd time, but you never know).

Just installing LMDE Cinnamon 64bit edition and then doing an upgrade should be enough to reproduce this problem.

[Vlad Orlov (monsta)]

This actually should not happen during the upgrade to UP7 - I've reproduced it [1] only during the upgrade to UP8 which is being tested right now. Anyway, to work around this, you can try updating plymouth first *before* performing the whole system upgrade:

sudo apt-get install plymouth

Also don't forget to upgrade debian-system-adjustments [2] *before* doing a full system upgrade.

Post at the forums if you still have any issues.

[1] http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=187&t=156044&start=60#p811325
[2] http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=198&t=146220

[Ayke (ayke)]

Strange - I could easily reproduce it. But I am now using the MATE version anyway. It's a bit lighter on the system (doesn't require the graphics card to run full-speed).

I haven't upgraded debian-system-adjustments before the others. Maybe that's what causing this bug?. But in my opinion, that should either be handled automatically or at least be mentioned in the update pack notes. How would I have otherwise known? I would expect a semi rolling release to seamlessly upgrade without having to know such details.

[Vlad Orlov (monsta)]

This won't be handled automatically, there's currently no tool to do that. As for the UP notes, they mention only the issues found during the testing of UP. They are not changed after UP release.

And finally, the quality of the upgrade is achieved by work of all the people who volunteer to test UP. Want it to be seamless? No problem, join the club, help to test the next UP, and tell other people to join and help finding bugs :)

[Vlad Orlov (monsta)]

LMDE 201403 has been released, so this is not an issue anymore. A workaround note has been added to the Update Pack notes for those who decide to upgrade from UP6.