Freeze during upgrade, now gdm unusable

[Michael Wayne Goodman]

Binary package hint: aptitude

Note: I am running from my Windows partition, so I cannot execute the commands to get, for example, precise version numbers. Also, because I cannot access system logs or anything, I will try to recount my steps from memory.

1) I was running Jaunty Alpha 5, trying to do a dist-upgrade after Alpha 6 was released

2) Aptitude was whatever version that was available for the Alpha 5 (I last ran a package update about a week ago (early-mid March 2009))

3) I noticed that scim-bridge crashed when I was using gvim, and I tried to report the crash. The crash reporting tool said it could not complete because packages were out of date. I tried doing "aptitude update" followed by "aptitude dist-upgrade". It said it would download many different package upgrades, and installing would take around 100Mb. I continued with the upgrade. The upgrade process downloaded all the packages fine. I expected it to then install and configure the updated packages without a problem.

4) ...Instead, it got about halfway (sorry I don't know what it failed on) and the screen froze. At the time I was running Firefox and Pidgin in addition to the terminal running the upgrade process. I used ctrl-alt-left_arrow to change desktops, and when it arrived on the other desktop, everything became unresponsive. The keyboard did nothing, the mouse cursor did not move. I waited a couple minutes, and nothing changed, so I hard-reset the computer by pressing the power button for 5-seconds. When the computer restarted, it failed to load gdm, so I was presented with a console screen. I ran a few commands, such as "dpkg --configure -a" and "aptitude upgrade", which seemed to continue installing where the failed upgrade left off, but at the end it said there were many errors. After restarting again, gdm still would not load. I couldn't even use vim to analyze config files. Both gdm and vim crashed, saying "Bus Error (core dumped)". I tried restarting in recovery mode, running the dpkg fixing tool (whatever that does), updating grub, fixing the display, etc.. Then resumed startup. No gdm. I restarted again, and now there were two kernel choices instead of 1. I tried both, and no luck. Fortunately I left an old, dusty Windows Vista partition on the drive, which booted fine. I am writing this bug report from that Vista partition.

A few more details:
I'm running on a Lenovo Thinkpad x61t tablet
I was using ext4 on both the / and /home partitions
I started using Jaunty from Alpha 4

I'm sorry that I'm not going to leave the broken Ubuntu installation on my drive for further analysis. I need to use this laptop for school and other tasks, so I'm going to do a fresh install of Jaunty Alpha 6. This is why I was trying to be very thorough in my process description.

Hopefully this problem does not affect other users.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

Sorry to hear about your trouble which apparently made you decide against using Ubuntu at all. But there really isn't enough information to pinpoint where it may have come from and if it was indeed a problem in a Ubuntu package. Since you removed the Ubuntu installation there also is no way to collect that information now or try and reproduce the problem. I'm sorry but there is nothing we can do but close this report. Please give Ubuntu another chance, try it from a live CD so it does not affect your main installation and let us know about any problems you may find.

[Michael Wayne Goodman (goodmami)]

Just for the record, I've been a near-full-time Linux user for several years before this incident, so I'm not abandoning Linux or Ubuntu. After the failed upgrade from Jaunty Alpha 5 to Alpha 6, I formatted the partition and did a fresh install of Alpha6, which worked well enough. I'm now running Karmic fairly smoothly.

I was just apologizing for not being able to keep the broken install on my computer for further debugging, as I needed to use the computer (yes, I know the warnings against running an alpha version on a production machine).

There's no way I can recall any more information about the problem, and I haven't seen it again since, so I'm fine with closing this bug. Thanks for your attention.