Cannot upgrade to Ubuntu 22.04 because of a pipewire PPA

[Martin Garbe]

The package ubuntu-desktop has problems when upgrading from 20.04 to 22.04.

2022-07-02 21:04:18,935 WARNING Can't mark 'ubuntu-desktop' for upgrade (E:Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.)
2022-07-02 21:04:19,147 ERROR Dist-upgrade failed: 'Broken packages after upgrade: ubuntu-desktop'

Sadly, I cannot find errors in the logs which indicated how to solve the problem.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 20.04
Package: ubuntu-release-upgrader-core 1:20.04.38
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.14.0-1044.49-oem 5.14.21
Uname: Linux 5.14.0-1044-oem x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu27.24
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckResult: skip
CrashDB: ubuntu
CurrentDesktop: ubuntu:GNOME
Date: Sat Jul 2 20:57:25 2022
InstallationDate: Installed on 2021-02-06 (510 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS "Focal Fossa" - Release amd64 (20200731)
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: ubuntu-release-upgrader
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to focal on 2022-07-02 (0 days ago)

[Nick Rosbrook (enr0n)]

The only thing that looks irregular to me is is your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/oem-sutton.newell-adalbrechta-meta.list. It does have content for jammy, so it is being kept at upgrade.

Can you please try disabling this source, and then try the upgrade again? You should be able to easily re-enable the source again after upgrade.

[Martin Garbe (martin234345354)]

I managed to upgrade my system and found the source of the problem.

The problem is that some pipewire packages were newer than the packages which Ubuntu 22.04 wanted to install. You can see this in the logs of VarLogDistupgradeAptlog.txt with the following line:

    gstreamer1.0-pipewire:amd64 Depends on pipewire:amd64 < 0.3.51-1~ubuntu20.04 @ii mK > (= 0.3.48-1ubuntu1) can't be satisfied!

The reason for the problem is that I installed some time ago a newer pipewire because I tested Bluetooth headphones. This was installed via an additional ppa (see https://askubuntu.com/questions/1339765/replacing-pulseaudio-with-pipewire-in-ubuntu-20-04)

 ppa:pipewire-debian/pipewire-upstream

Now that we know the root cause what is the fix?
The correct way is to use ppa-purge via:

 sudo ppa-purge ppa:pipewire-debian/pipewire-upstream

Why didn't I do this before?
Well, as a part of the upgrade process all ppa repos have to be deactivated. Therefore I deleted the ppa files manually in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/. After doing this you have no indication which package was installed by which source and everything worked smoothely and you forget these packages.

Let me tell you one additional way to upgrade even without ppa-purge. This was the way I found the problem.
I uninstalled ubuntu-desktop package. Then I was able to execute 'do-release-upgrade -d'. After reboot my system booted in text console because desktop was uninstalled. Now I tried to 'apt install ubuntu-desktop' and the system gave me an error with a useful hint:

 The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  gstreamer1.0-pipewire : Depends: pipewire (= 0.3.48-1ubuntu1) but 0.3.51-1~ubuntu20.04 is to be installed
                          Depends: libpipewire-0.3-0 (= 0.3.48-1ubuntu1) but 0.3.51-1~ubuntu20.04 is to be installed

Then I had to manually uninstall pipewire, libpipewire-0.3-0 and libspa-0.2-bluetooth including all dependencies. After that 'apt install ubuntu-desktop' was successfull.