upgrading from 14.04 to 16.04 or direct install of 16.04 fails

[Kern Sibbald]

This is probably the same as many of the other bug reports already reported on updating from 14.04 or directly installing 16.04, so after reading this bug report, feel free to close it.

I have been using Ubuntu LTS for about 10 years now and never had any serious problems. 16.04 is a total disaster for me.

- Starting from a 14.04 desktop system fully patched and doing a dist-upgrade fails leaving many uninstalled packages and package conflicts that I have not been able to fix manually (50-100 packages). I think I know all the tricks for installing almost anything, but no go here.

- New Lenovo Yoga 900. Install 14.04 zero problems. Fully update it. dist-upgrade. Same results as above. Note the 14.04 had only Ubuntu packages and was only about a week old before the dist-upgrade.

- Retry the dist-upgrade on the above. No go, same problem.

- Do a new upgrade from a USB stick of 16.04 on the above system containing 14.04 partially upgraded to 16.04 but not working. It produced a working 16.04, but destroyed my Windows dual boot, and wiped out the Windows recovery partition. This is extremely annoying because I had not made recovery disks. Once I get new install media and re-install Windows 10 (beautiful with a nice touch screen even if it is Windows) I am thinking about sticking to Windows (after 16 years of using Linux on my laptops this is really bad).

- Do a fresh install of 16.04 on a tower computer. All goes quite well. However after doing an apt-get upgrade to get fully patched, then part way through loading about 100 packages for a developer's setup, I double click on the Amazon icon, which comes up slowly then totally freezes the system. This is much like the black screen syndrome that Windows used to have -- requires a power off (hold the power button down 10 seconds)!

- Reboot after power off in prior case, and things seem to work until I double click on the Amazon button and then close the window. The app crashes with a webapp-container problem.

Conclusion:
This is not the way to keep happy users. 16.04 is for me unusable. For the first time in a very long time, I am very disappointed. IMO, 16.04 should be considered unstable beta software.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.04
Package: ubuntu-release-upgrader-core 1:0.220.8
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.13.0-87.133-generic 3.13.11-ckt39
Uname: Linux 3.13.0-87-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.14.1-0ubuntu3.21
Architecture: amd64
CrashDB: ubuntu
CurrentDesktop: XFCE
Date: Mon Jun 6 16:53:55 2016
InstallationDate: Installed on 2014-12-23 (531 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS "Trusty Tahr" - Release amd64 (20140722.2)
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: ubuntu-release-upgrader
Symptom: dist-upgrade
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to trusty on 2016-05-16 (21 days ago)
VarLogDistupgradeAptlog:
 Log time: 2016-05-16 09:48:08.557294
 Log time: 2016-05-16 09:48:12.502444

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Kern Sibbald (kern)]

Last night my wife made the mistake of answering yes to the upgrade to 16.04 message that appeared on her 14.04 Gnome desktop. Like the other upgrades this one was a spectacular failure. The net result is a black screen of death. I haven't seen this kind of total failure since the early Windows days.

This is really pitiful. Almost 3 months after I first reported this problem (and there are *many* other similar reports), and something like four or five months after the product release, it still has a 100% failure rate to install here (4 different machines).

The worst part of it, is though I am a relatively experienced Linux developer and long time Ubuntu user, I have been unable to resurrect a single one of these broken machines, because they end up in such a messed up final state of missing, conflicting, or misconfigured packages.

I have no choice but to follow advice that previously given only by Microsoft and re-install the system from scratch. Two of the updates involved long running machines, so they probably had some old packages, but they were all 100% patched to the latest 14.04. Two of the machines were very recent new installations of 14.04 (less than a month old).

Sorry for some of the insulting/sarcastic language, but for a long time you had a great product, but for this release you have really screwed up -- probably because you have diversified into too many new "products" and not allocated appropriate resources to your base system.

[Kern Sibbald (kern)]

Hello,

I have thought a lot about why *all* my upgrades from 14.04 to 16.04 have failed. This does not fit with my past experience with Ubuntu, and quite frankly, it is worrisome. However, one thing does come to mind: I run LVM on virtually all my computers, and this may be the common element where the upgrader fails.

Have you sufficiently tested upgrading 14.04 LVM installations (particularly those done manually) to 16.04?

Note, there is nothing unusual or strange about my LVM installations:
/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
/dev/mapper/vgdisk-tmp on /tmp type ext4 (rw)
/dev/mapper/vgdisk-home on /home type ext4 (rw) [home]
/dev/mapper/vgdisk-opt on /opt type ext4 (rw)
/dev/mapper/vgdisk-var on /var type ext4 (rw)

or on another machine
/dev/mapper/main-root / ext4 rw,noatime,errors=remount-ro 0 0
/dev/mapper/main-tmp /tmp ext4 rw,noatime 0 0
/dev/mapper/main-boot /boot ext4 rw,noatime 0 0
/dev/mapper/main-home /home ext4 rw 0 0
/dev/mapper/main-usr /usr ext4 rw,noatime 0 0
/dev/mapper/main-var /var ext4 rw,noatime 0 0