Comment 14 for bug 1756840

Thank you Chris. Having first checked my backup, your post gave me the confidence to start the upgrade. It was a complete nightmare. I thought my system was completely borked. The upgrade (using do-release-upgrade) froze part way through, immediately after reporting the following to the console:

Generating a new Secure Boot signing key:
Generating a 2048 bit RSA private key
....+++
..................................................................+++
writing new private key to '/var/lib/shim-signed/mok/MOK.priv'

Waited about an hour, but it was clear that it was stuck and it didn't appear than anything of significance was going on. Finally, I was forced to CTRL-C the upgrade and hope for the best. The upgrade wasn't able to restart itself because it thought something was using apt. So, I had to manually kill various processes that had locked apt, including the bionic process (which was presumably the upgrade process itself?), and was then able to get the upgrade going again... but somehow it left my system with broken dependencies.

Also the upgrade was producing extremely confusing messages such as:

The software on this computer is up to date.
There are no upgrades available for your system. The upgrade will now be cancelled.
Do you want to start the upgrade?
Continue [yN] Details[d]
> d
No longer supported: .... ecryptfs-utils ...

What does that mean? It's completed the upgrade, and it says the software is up-to-date (great!), but that is just after it has told me that there are broken dependencies that can't be resolved... So, when it says the upgrade will be cancelled, does this mean it will try to roll back the changes to recover... and what does it mean by 'starting' the upgrade, when it should have finished already... and what do the responses y and n mean in this context ... and when it says that ecryptfs-utils is no longer supported, so what? Is it planning to remove it, which I don't want, or is it just a warning? It's completely opaque, and ultimately you just have to choose y or n at random and hope for the best, and then go around the loop again when the first thing you tried results in you being presented with the same prompt after something may or may not have changed...

I was finally able to complete the upgrade, but then had to manually resolve the broken package dependencies. There appeared to be multiple problems, but I fortunately tackled what appears to have been the root cause first, which was gir1.2-freedesktop. Neither

dpkg --configure -a

nor

apt-get -f install

worked, so I had to force remove it using

sudo dpkg --remove --force-remove-reinstreq gir1.2-freedesktop

Then I reinstalled it and the packages that were removed with it to recover. I was finally able to boot into an upgraded system, enter my secure boot password and ...

it worked, *including the encrypted home*. How about that for a seamless upgrade! That was from an Ubuntu 17.10 server install, on which xubuntu-core had been installed. Let's hope the other upgrades go a bit more smoothly than that!