Comment 1 for bug 154434

Revision history for this message
PowerUser (i-am-sergey) wrote :

Now there is continuation of this update story - I'm attempting to recover my half-updated system...
 As you may know, I was not able to perform upgrade and after updater failure I used my half-upgraded system and attempted to get things working properly.

After some googling, reading more about update procedure and finally taking a look on my Adept settings I figured out that I need re-enable some kinds of updates (disabled during [failed] update) and refresh packages list.This should enable dist upgrade.However doing so has completely crashed my APT subsystem :(.GUI software reported some problems with database but no any detailed hints. Running apt-get has made things clear.At any action error was always same and it was related to packages database:

# apt-cache stats
E: Dynamic MMap ran out of room
E: Error occurred while processing kdeprint (NewVersion1)
E: Problem with MergeList /var/lib/apt/lists/archive.ubuntu.com_ubuntu_dists_feisty-updates_main_binary-amd64_Packages

This effectively prevented me from dealing with apt subsystem at all, totally eliminating all my chances to upgrade. Some investigation and googling has shown that this issue has workaround:

1) Create file /etc/apt/apt.conf (if not exists)
2) add the following line into it:
APT::Cache-Limit 125829120;

In original solution 12582912 was suggested but this is too few and as for me it just delayed a bit appearance of this error.Increasing cache size by factor 10 was enough to get apt-get and all related tools working again.Hooray!

Now I'm launched adept, ensured all update types enabled and refreshed packages.Hooray, now I can dist-upgrade!
Upgrade applied ok, looks like downloaded packages were taken from cache.So system is basically updated and works.Reboot was requested, it has completed and overall status was success...

...except that my system did not booted and I had to fix /boot/grub/menu.lst manually.This happens since I'm booting from 2nd physical HDD while first one is data-only and it looks like my BIOS has pretty strange idea about mapping this second HDD as first if you're switching boot in bios to boot from it, actually seems to be some sort of BIOS "surprises". I'm really suspect my bios is quite bigged and needs update.Thanks to Live CD I can mount my HDD and correct menu.lst to get my system back in booting state.Voila! :)

But er... while things are genereally working, upon reboot adept notifier has falsely claimed that dist-upgrade has arrived (yikes!).This is pretty strange since updater has cleaned things up and adjusted software channels.When I attempted to run updater to perform dist upgrade it did worked up to some point and then discovered the truth :) that dist upgrade is not really needed.It output error:
 Your system is up-to-date.
There are no upgrades available for your system. The upgrade will now be cancelled.

This is OK :) but hey, why it offers to upgrade already upgraded system? I did something wrong when doing crash-recovery steps?