16.04 HWE -> 18.04 = xorg held back (+ partial breakage because of it)

[Harald Sitter]

When upgrading from a 16.04 installation which had HWE (later point releases) xorg is getting held back as apt is having trouble resolving the path from xserver-xorg-core-hwe-16.04 to xserver-xorg-core.

In at least one instance I've seen a system from a user POV completely break because of that as it failed to get any keyboard input. Forcing xorg to get properly installed fixes any and all issues as expected.

- devel upgrade from xenial to bionic
- restart
- xorg not upgraded
- try to get a hold of tty or repair mode
- sudo apt install dist-upgrade && sudo apt install xorg
- restart
- working system

I am going to attach logs for an ubuntu-desktop system, but I've also seen this with kubuntu-desktop and the derived neon-desktop. It's a bit unclear to me why apt is having trouble with the resolution, it does seem like a fairly serious problem though.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

Thanks for your report.There is this error in main.log

2018-02-15 06:13:42,478 DEBUG Running PostInstallScript: './xorg_fix_proprietary.py'
2018-02-15 06:13:42,484 ERROR got error from PostInstallScript ./xorg_fix_proprietary.py (g-exec-error-quark: Failed to execute child process "./xorg_fix_proprietary.py" (No such file or directory) (8))

[Harald Sitter (apachelogger)]

A problem in of itself, but likely unrelated to the held upgrade. From a look at the code of the script it would only edit the xorg.conf to disable proprietary drivers.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

Confirmed by installing 16.04 daily and upgrading to 18.04.

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

needs a new release of xorg-lts-transitional in bionic, which I've got halfway done

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

should be fixed now with 3:14.1 in the archive

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

I tested an upgrade today from Ubuntu 16.04 (with plymouth packages from xenial-proposed and xserver-xorg-core-hwe-16.04 installed) to Ubuntu 18.04. There were no errors during the upgrade process and I was able to log into a functioning Ubuntu desktop environment after rebooting when the upgrade was complete.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Upgrade log from a success.