Problem installing tex-common on upgrade to 13.10

[Christian]

When I started upgrading my system (Kubuntu) from 13.04 to 13.10 the "upgrader" told me that it encountered a problem while updating tex-common package.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[bernd (bd-reiss)]

Same here while upgrading from Ubuntu 13.04, while at the same time also having encountered a problem with "tex."

[N7DR (doc-evans)]

This is terrible. I use TeX to create almost all my written work. I shall now have to quickly decide on and switch to a different distruibution, since I simply cannot work without TeX. I can't imagine how this was allowed to happen; TeX is hardly obscure.

[Daniel Ricao Canelhas (daniel-canelhas)]

I saw some console output regarding tex-common during the upgrade but I don't see what were the actual problem is. Everything TeX related is working fine on my system post-upgrade. Is anyone actually having troubles with it?

[N7DR (doc-evans)]

See bug 1249649... apparently, according to the response there, it was this failure to install tex-common properly that led to a complete failure of the upgrade.

At the end I was left with a system that had lost half the desktop information, had no sound, could not mount remote disks, and couldn't even find the optical drives.

Over the years I've had several less-than-stellar experiences upgrading Kubuntu on various machines, but this was without doubt the worst -- all, apparently, because of a failure to upgrade TeX properly (goodness knows how the two are related, or why it happened only on one of the three machines I upgraded; but I've given up trying to understand it and switched to wheezy on the affected machine since I really need that machine to work properly).

[scott stygar (stygar)]

"subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1"

Happened upgrading Kubunutu to v 14.04