Trusty to Xenial release upgrade fails

[Erick Brunzell]

I haven't been able to recover from the release upgrade failure to the point where I could boot the affected OS and file a bug properly using ubuntu-bug so I had no choice but to do this the dirty and least effective way.

Preparing for Ubuntu GNOME Xenial Beta 1 I tried a Trusty -> Xenial release upgrade using update-manager -d -c and it began oddly, that is no GUI appeared and it seemed to offer the upgrade via terminal but I decided to proceed. Below is a copy-n-paste of part of the terminal output:

lance@lance-desktop:~$ update-manager -d -c
Checking for a new Ubuntu release
authenticate 'xenial.tar.gz' against 'xenial.tar.gz.gpg'
extracting 'xenial.tar.gz'
can't load DistUpgradeViewGtk3 (Namespace Vte not available for version 2.91)
can't load DistUpgradeViewGtk3 (Namespace Vte not available for version 2.91)
can't load DistUpgradeViewKDE (No module named 'PyQt4')

<snip>

Calculating the changes

Calculating the changes

Do you want to start the upgrade?

2 installed packages are no longer supported by Canonical. You can
still get support from the community.

98 packages are going to be removed. 431 new packages are going to be
installed. 1347 packages are going to be upgraded.

You have to download a total of 910 M. This download will take about
11 minutes with your connection.

Installing the upgrade can take several hours. Once the download has
finished, the process cannot be canceled.

 Continue [yN] Details [d]

End copy-n-paste.

No doubt now my decision to proceed was foolish but somewhat early in the upgrade process I checked and there was no activity whatsoever, no hard drive activity lights, just a black screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left hand corner. So i waited for quite a while and finally did a hard reset. Not surprisingly things were quite broken and despite a considerable amount of effort I've not been able to recover to use ubuntu-bug.

I did however copy the full /var/log/dist-upgrade folder to a flash drive with the exception of apt-clone_system_state.tar.gz which complained about permissions. It consists of:

20160223-1734 20160223-1740 apt.log lspci.txt main.log.partial

Both 20160223-1734 & 20160223-1740 are folders that contain additional files but for now I'll attach the apt.log, lspci.txt, and main.log.partial.

I was testing on bare metal with a wired connection:

Intel Atom CPU 230 @ 1.60GHz
Intel 82945G/GZ Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 02)
Intel N10/ICH 7 Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 01)
Realtek RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller (rev 02)
2GB DDR2 RAM

That had been a fresh install of Ubuntu GNOME 14.04.4 leftover from Trusty iso-testing. Media info shows amd64 (20160217.1).

[Erick Brunzell (lbsolost)]

There are 4 files inside 20160223-1734 and I'll begin attaching them here.

[Erick Brunzell (lbsolost)]

2nd of those 4

[Erick Brunzell (lbsolost)]

3rd of those 4

[Erick Brunzell (lbsolost)]

4th of those 4

[Erick Brunzell (lbsolost)]

20160223-1740 contains only one file and I'll attach it here

[Ubuntu QA Website (ubuntuqa)]

This bug has been reported on the Ubuntu ISO testing tracker.

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/1549067

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

The issues with DistUpgradeViewGtk3 have been fixed already. The first dpkg error is the following:

Regenerating fonts cache... failed.
See /var/log/fontconfig.log for more information.
dpkg: error processing package fontconfig (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1

[Erick Brunzell (lbsolost)]

I repeated this today with Ubuntu GNOME i386 and indeed the GUI part of things is fixed. Still failed though just as you said the first error reported was:

dpkg: error processing package fontconfig (--configure):
subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1

But the process continued for quite a while then finally offered to file a bug report but the upgrade was still running so I waited, then finally a warning showed saying:

Could not install the upgrades

The upgrade has aborted. Your system could be in an unusable state. A recovery will run now (dpkg --configure -a).

After clicking on Close dpkg ran for quite a while and then finally came the black screen. Nothing was responsive so I forced a reboot and not surprisingly it fails to boot now.

I didn't mess around trying to recover this time though so the logs are much simpler to attach. I'll begin that now. There are six in total I'll attach the 1st here.

[Erick Brunzell (lbsolost)]

Now the 2nd from that failed Trusty -> Xenial i386 upgrade.

[Erick Brunzell (lbsolost)]

The 3rd

[Erick Brunzell (lbsolost)]

The 4th

[Erick Brunzell (lbsolost)]

The 5th (quite a few errors)

[Erick Brunzell (lbsolost)]

The 6th is an empty term.log so won't attach.

[Erick Brunzell (lbsolost)]

I checked late yesterday and this affects Ubuntu too. In that case the Trusty install I started with was running the original Trusty kernel and X-stack whereas the two failed Ubuntu GNOME upgrades had started with Trusty + the Wily HWE stack.

[Erick Brunzell (lbsolost)]

I believe bug #1559463 may be a duplicate.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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