kernel update errors in 8.10 upgrade

[bburhans]

While upgrading from Hardy (8.04) to Intrepid (8.10) via the Updates Manager, there were a number of errors, the last few of which I took screenshots of and selectively compiled into one PNG image for use here. After the "upgrade" had finished with so many errors, a couple of which seemed fatal to the upgrade, I loaded the updates manager again, where I received more errors, but this might be because I had not yet restarted the system. I then did reboot into Linux (I'm dual-booting Vista Home Premium as well) from Grub and got a couple more errors, although it did seem to boot using the new kernel, which I was happy about given the volume of error messages regarding the 2.6.27-7 kernel package installation. As I said above, I did not capture every error message, but the ones I did take are included in the attachment, from top to bottom chronologically, and their translations are below.

1.) The dialogue box reads, "We're sorry; the installation or update of package 'update-manager' failed." This is immediately after I got a similar one about the kernel's package. At the bottom of the terminal, note the error about GConf, but that has to do with not being able to find the config server and is probably not relevant.

2.) When I clicked "report the error" of course it tried to open Firefox, which caused it to give me another slew of errors about that for some reason. (Firefox was not running, but maybe there was a ghost process that caused this.) The rearmost dialogue box reads "The updates could not be installed. The update will be interrupted now. Your system could be left in an unusable state. It is carrying out a recovery (dpkg --configure -a)." The last line in the upgrade window's terminal after the bit about GConf (same error as before, by the way) reads: "intrepid: Fatal IO error (invalid file descriptor) on X server :0.0."

3.) This is where I (stupidly) reopened the updates window to try again, where by the way it acknowledged that it had been updated by no longer offering me 8.10 as an option at the top. When I attempted to install the 27 updates it found, it shortly spit out the following errors. I think the active window is giving a recap of all the major kernel errors it found ("An error has been produced. The following details are provided:"). From top to bottom, the error descriptions read: "the post-installation script subprocess returned an error code of 3" with the rest echoing "dependency problems - left without being configured".

4-5.) After I restarted, there was the expected notification (hidden behind the odd one in front) about the update's panel change about the exit button, but along with this balloon about the fact that it found an error on start-up. When I clicked the icon, it displayed the dialogue box in picture #5, which says "We're sorry; the installation or update of the 'linux-image-2.6.27-7-generic 2.6.27-7.15' package failed." Using the shown "Report problem" button brought me here.

To recap: although it appears to have upgraded successfully, there were a number of severe errors regarding the kernel packages in the process. Just something to look into; if I find out that the update was not entirely successful, I will annotate this report to reflect that.

ProblemType: Package
Architecture: amd64
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.10
ErrorMessage: el subproceso post-installation script devolvió el código de salida de error 3
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: linux-image-2.6.27-7-generic 2.6.27-7.15
ProcCmdLine: User Name=UUID=df8e6861-ae42-4e85-badd-d3fedd8adbe2 ro quiet splash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.27-7.15-generic
SourcePackage: linux
Title: package linux-image-2.6.27-7-generic 2.6.27-7.15 failed to install/upgrade: el subproceso post-installation script devolvió el código de salida de error 3

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

Thanks for your report.

Regarding the kernel error, did you choose the 3 way merge during upgrade ?
Could you please file a new report for each bug you are experiencing, this makes triaging work much easier.

Thank you.

[bburhans (bburhans)]

To my surprise, it actually asked me multiple times how I wanted to update the menu.lst; the first time, I chose the merge, yes; after that, I just had it rewrite the automagic section. I have to add a statement to the kernel options to get my touchpad to work, but I didn't consider it a huge priority as long as the update completed successfully. So, in a way, the answer is both yes and no. It did end up rewriting my menu.lst without my custom kernel option, so I guess the subsequent requests to overwrite were successful, whether or not the "experimental" merge was.

The only bug that I am posting is the "kernel error" of which you speak. I included reference to two other error messages just for contextual information.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 269539, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide. Feel free to continue to report any other bugs you may find.