Upgrade 11.10 to 12.04 fails on multiple machines (related to libjpeg8?)

[John Stultz]

On a few of my machines, when upgrading to 12.04 from 11.10 (both x86_64), the upgrade somehow failed.

It appeared to finish successfully, but after rebooting, the login window had missing-icons (broken Xs in the upper right corner) and loaded no background image (only grid of dots). When I tried to log in, I got a blank screen and the mouse cursor would move, but nothing loaded.

After switching to vt2, on a hunch I tried running "apt-get install -f", this prompted me that libjpeg8:i386 (i believe) would be installed. However, the system churned for quite a while (probably more then 10 minutes) setting up numourous other packages (including the kernel). After that completed, I rebooted and everything was working fine.

On a different machine, which uses LUKS, I saw the same problem, but it manifested in a much worse way. After the installation prompted me to reboot, the system would hang very early with a black screen and the caps key flashing. After booting with quiet the splash removed, I saw that the kernel could not find the root device under /dev/mapper/. After playing around with some options to try to fix that, I ended up booting with one of the 11.10 kernels still present. This was able to boot the machine, but then I saw the same behavior as the first system. It seems the upgrade bombed out before building a proper initrd that supported dm. I ran "apt-get install -f", and again libjpeg8 was noted as needing to be installed, and it confugured a number of packages (including the kernel - properly setting up the initrd), then I rebooted. Everything worked fine at that point.

If I wasn't a developer this would be very terrifying.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

Thanks for your report.

Please install all updates fron oneiric-updates and try the upgrade again. Before the upgrade verify that apt 0.8.16~exp5ubuntu13.3 is installed on your system. Attach the content of /var/log/dist-upgrade if it fails again. Thanks

[John Stultz (jstultz)]

Well, I did install all oneiric updates that were present over the weekend before updating. Although I'm confused as the ...13.3 apt was reportedly published 4/25 and I did upgrades between 4/26 and 4/29. Even so looking at the logs, they both list apt ....13.2.

Anyway, from the apt ....13.3 changelog it does sound like the issue has been hopefully addressed:
" * Backport fixes from precise verison of apt, to fix multiarch upgrades
    from oneiric."

As my machines are already upgraded, I cannot "try the upgrade again". I guess we can just hope its fixed and no one else hits this.

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

Thanks for following up. I'm closing this report due to your last comment.
Don't hesitate to submit any new bug.