sudo update-manager -c -d crashes during xubuntu upgrade

[Johannes Reinhardt]

Hi,

I just tried to upgrade my Xubuntu Dapper Drake to Edgy. I used $ sudo update-manager -c -d.

Everything went fine, the packages were downloaded and installed, the installer asked for some changed configuration files (cups related IIRC). The progress bar showed 3 minutes left. When the update Manager suddenly disappeared. X was also dead (there were no windows, no bar, just the background image). I had tried to start Quod Libet (a music player) shortly before the crash.

I used a text terminal to reboot the machine, but now it doesn't boot. In recoverymode it says something like "waiting for root filesystem" (I can check that if its important).

I will try to attach the logs from /var/log/dist-upgrade, but at the end of apt.log is a probably important message:

"Package xubuntu-system-tools has broken dep on gnome-system-tools
  Considering gnome-system-tools 0 as a solution to xubuntu-system-tools 0
  Removing xubuntu-system-tools rather than change gnome-system-tools
Investigating evince-gtk
Package evince-gtk has broken dep on evince
  Considering evince 1 as a solution to evince-gtk 0
  Removing evince-gtk rather than change evince
Done
/usr/share/themes/Clearlooks/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:59: error: unexpected identifier `animation',
expected character `}'
/tmp/tmpKRewzQ/DistUpgradeViewGtk.py:286: GtkWarning: GdkWindow 0x1c4abca unexpectedly de
stroyed
  gtk.main_iteration()
/tmp/tmpKRewzQ/DistUpgradeViewGtk.py:286: GtkWarning: GdkWindow 0x1c00048 unexpectedly de
stroyed
  gtk.main_iteration()
/tmp/tmpKRewzQ/DistUpgradeViewGtk.py:286: GtkWarning: GdkWindow 0x1c0003e unexpectedly de
stroyed
  gtk.main_iteration()
/tmp/tmpKRewzQ/DistUpgradeViewGtk.py:286: GtkWarning: GdkWindow 0x1c0003c unexpectedly de
stroyed
  gtk.main_iteration()
/tmp/tmpKRewzQ/DistUpgradeViewGtk.py:286: GtkWarning: GdkWindow 0x1c00007 unexpectedly de
stroyed
  gtk.main_iteration()
"

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

I can confirm the crash here during a xubuntu dapper->edgy upgrade. I get exactly the same error message.

I woudl appreciate feedback from the xubuntu team, it looks like we have to remove the upgrader as the recommended way to go from dapper->edgy in xubuntu :/

Cheers,
 Michael

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

As a sidenote. This problems seems to be only apprearing on xubuntu. I tried a dist-upgrade with ubuntu and the clearlooks theme and it worked fine.

[Jani Monoses (jani)]

in edgy xubuntu-desktop depends on evince-gtk |evince and xubuntu-system-tools | gnome-system-tools but I have no idea how it breaks the upgrade :(

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Well, this is what causes the crash:

/usr/share/themes/Clearlooks/gtk-2.0/gtkrc:59: error: unexpected identifier `animation',
expected character `}'
/tmp/tmpKRewzQ/DistUpgradeViewGtk.py:286: GtkWarning: GdkWindow 0x1c4abca unexpectedly de

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

But I have no idea how this is triggered and why it pretty much makes all gtk clients break :/

[stocchero (guga)]

Had the same problem, saved my installation doing the following:
1- after restart, when the computer stops booting, and there is nothing but a black screen with blinking white dash, press and hold together CTRL + ALT + F1 (to get to the console).
2- sudo dpkg --configure -a
3- after all the configuration, sudo halt.

This worked fine for me.

[Brian Cabunac (cabu1966)]

I had the same problem as described here. When Xfce died, I hit CTRL + ALT +F2 to get to a console and ran "sudo dpkg --configure -a" like stocchero (only difference is I didn't reboot). This picked up from "Setting up libbonoboui2-0". After all the remaining configuration completed, I rebooted and now have a working 6.10.

[grahams1 (gps1539)]

I ran into double woes when updating to 6.10 and I still could not get my screen working after I ran
sudo dpkg --configure -a
and reboot

I resorted to downloading the 6.10 install cd and was about to reinstall but I found my display didn't work off the CD image (display worked fine on 6.06). This lead me to find out that the mga driver for my Matrox 400 graphics card has another known bug.

A working driver can be found at :

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1711537#post1711537

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

The bug grahams1 describes (matrox g400) is bug #58721

[tigobos (tigobos)]

I tried the updater as well. When I came back to the computer, the screen saver was on, and it had forgotten my password. I had to reboot and then X didn't work anymore. It was something with the Nvidia drivers. I'm not so good at this, so I will have to reinstall from scratch.

[MikeR (mike-rechtman)]

I saw the EdgyUpdate page, and, not knowing there were problems did
sudo update-manager -c
and then clicked on 'upgrade to 6.10'

Took quite a while, but succeeded -- no noticeable problems.
(This was on a Digital HiNote laptop with 96MB memory)

Just lucky, I guess...

[hisham (hisham-0812)]

i use ubuntu 6.06 and i have problem because i want play music MP3,vcd in computer .the system without internet to support player..how to update my computer. ubuntu update can download ?

[Jarno Suni (jarnos)]

I add to tigobos' comment that I tried to upgrade using the apt-get way, but got the same kind of problem: Later the screensaver was on and it had forgotten my password! Now I am stuck with uncompleted upgrade. I think people should be advised to turn off any screensaver before upgrading.

[Johannes Reinhardt (johannes-reinhardt)]

I recently updated to Feisty using update manager, and there were no problems.

[Paul Whittaker (launchpad-pdw)]

I had this problem yesterday upgrading Ubuntu Dapper to Edgy. Note that this wasn't XUbuntu.
I was running the update via `gksudo "update-manager -c" '

My experience was exactly as described above: package downloading went fine, lots of "preparing to install..." reports with no problem, and then lots of "Setting up..." reports before the crash. The estimate was down to "About 2 minutes" from an initial 30, which was fairly accurate based on the clock I was watching.

Shortly before the crash, the reports appeared to stop (there had new output at least every couple of seconds up to this point, and this was a pause of many seconds with no output), and the load meter hit 100% for several seconds (ten? fifteen?) before the installer window simply vanished. No error dialog, just "Baff! Where did that window go?"

Re-running update-manager from the System menu brought up a window of the right size and shape, but it had no content. I tried this several times with no success.

Thinking that a reboot might solve the problem (it did on the other machine I'd upgraded when the installer gave up), I found that the install would not boot. Grub was fine, and there was a new entry at the top of the list, but the screen stayed black with a flashing cursor for several minutes without any harddrive activity at all. Rebooting and trying the "recovery mode" kernel didn't work either, but from the boot messages it was clear that the SATA modules were not present. This explained the kernel's final "waiting for root filesystem..." message, since that was on /dev/sda5. After some length of time (five minutes?) this gave up, and dropped me into BusyBox. There was a message about being "unable to find tty" (I forget the precise words).

Eventually I managed to boot the system using an old kernel. There was a major problem with the filesystem (I assume it was the root partition, though it could have been /usr) which dropped me into a manual fsck. A large number of inodes (about a hundred) needed correcting. I didn't catch the exact error, but I got the impression that inodes that no longer appeared to be in use had not been freed properly, so inode counts and free space bitmaps were wrong.

The system then booted, but X was broken. It was trying to open /dev/input/mice rather than /dev/input/mouse0 and so died because it had no core pointer. I ran `dpkg --configure -a' and that seemed to fix things - gdm came back up - but a "bad variable" error in /etc/gdm/Xsession stopped me from logging in.

Changing to the "default Gnome" session allowed me to log in, but the system was obviously still confused: browsers and terminals would open, but dropdown menus didn't (they highlighted, but no menu dropped), and I couldn't give keyboard input (or focus - cursor stayed hollow) to anything because the keyboard had stopped responding. LEDs, Ctrl-Alt-F1, everything. After I'd been looking at it for several minutes the console did eventually switch, the keyboard started responding again, and I could log in to a virtual terminal, but the problem logging in to GDM still remained.

My assumption is that the system is subtlely broken, probably due to missing files or ot...

[Paul Whittaker (launchpad-pdw)]

Summary of last paragraph of previous comment: "Live" broken system available - anything people want me to try on it?

[Sorry - hadn't realised comments were clipped.]

[Paul Whittaker (launchpad-pdw)]

Attaching logs from /var/log/dist-upgrade on broken system. apt.log seems to indicate problems with broken dependencies and increasingly desperate attempts to find solutions. Things have also gone badly wrong in term.log, as the file ends part-way through a line with 130 null bytes.

[Paul Whittaker (launchpad-pdw)]

Giving up hope on fixing this install: I'm getting some screen corruption with elinks on the console (misplaced characters), and ld is having trouble:
  ld: warning: cannot find entry symbol _start; defaulting to 0000000008049720
Hopefully the fresh install will be easier. Thanks all anyway.

[Bjorn Tipling (bjorn-ambientchill)]

I experienced this bug. I almost lost months of work but I did lose tons of customized configuration because of it. I went ahead and just cleared out my drive and installed with a clean install without upgrading. I'm a little worried about upgrading to Feisty because of this.

[Jani Monoses (jani)]

Bjorn, did this happen to you on a dapper->edgy upgrade? We are concerned if this happens on edgy->fesity upgrades, as we cannot fix this for edgy anymore.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

This does no longer happens for edgy->feisty upgrades (did two successfull test upgrades).

[Jarno Suni (jarnos)]

What about dapper->feisty?

[Bjorn Tipling (bjorn-ambientchill)]

I upgraded to Feisty with no problems. It was really smooth and painless. I just clicked the upgrade to (x)Ubuntu 7.01. I think the dapper to edgy upgrade still needs to be fixed. It's not right to leave it hanging out there. I'd fix it if I could.

[Dan Rippon (rippond)]

Through this method I could not upgrade Xubuntu from 6.10 to 7.04. Everything looked fine, and it says no longer says there is a new version available. However, everything that I can see is exactly the same, with no mentions of the new versions in sources.list, or at the splash, help files, etc. It didn't break anything -- it just didn't update.

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

@Dan Rippon: can you please file a seperate bug about this and attach the output of:
$ ls -l ~/.update-manager/meta-release
$ dpkg -l update-manager
$ cat ~/.update-manager/meta-release

Thanks,
 Michael