Upgrade From Kubuntu Feisty to Gutsy Beta incomplete

[amsri]

Hi

FIRST OF ALL I WOULD LIKE TO SAY THAT I AM TOTALLY NEW TO LINUX AND UBUNTU. I installed feisty on my Toshiba laptop about two months ago and was so happy with it that, in anticipation of getting more and better, I decided to upgrade to Kubuntu Gutsy 7.10 Beta released yesterday.

Some information:

I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro M70 with dual boot (XP Pro and Feisty 7.04) running before I went for Upgrade. I also have both the Gnome and KDE desktops and was switching frequently to know and enjoy different things new to me. In fact I first installed Edubuntu and then installed Kubuntu-desktop on top of it using synaptic.

I used adept manager to carry out the upgrade and followed the steps mentioned on https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GutsyUpgrades#head-3cb12417f0af7f24d4a34f2ae4040bf791c42f52

The upgrade hung on "Modifying Softwares channels" as nothing happened for half an hour and I had to quit the upgrade.

Thereafter, I restarted the computer and restarted the upgrade using kdesu "adept_manager --version-upgrade"
It started this time and the tool fetched all the upgrade, unpacked it and started configuring the packages.

All went fine till configuring gmone-terminal-editor which failed to configure and I closed the window as prompted by the upgrade tool. The upgrade tool started configuring samba but was never able to do so. It was stuck on "Configuring Samba.." for an hour when I again decided to abort the upgrade.

Now I am nowhere and my system in the middle of nowhere. Grub boot menu now shows several gutsy KERNELS. I am able to boot into Kubuntu using the old Kernel ending with some....16. However, the newest Kernel ending with some .22 fails and I see some Kernel Panic message. When I boot into gutsy using old kernel I can see all the desktop environment but since the system is in the middle of nowhere several services are not available or don't start eg. my network connection (wireless). Tough I can see several new gutsy softwares like Dolphin.

Now my question is: what to do to get my system to a normal state (without wiping out every thing and re-installing). PLEASE HELP. Any answer, keeping in mind that I am a newbie, would be highly appreciated. I thing comes to my mind but I am not sure if it will work and that is: dpkg --configure -a

Thanks to all in advance.


.

[MoonRise]

I had similar problems at first. When I restarted the tool, it downloaded all the packages and then just closes. Anybody know what's up with that? Where can I find an "Error" log? The good thing is that I can still reboot the system and it performs as it did. Bad thing is all the repository settings have been changed, so I doubt I'll be able to keep it Feisty, unless someone can tell me how to roll that back.

[MoonRise]

More information: Restarted the Version Upgrade process again, it gets to the modifying of software channels displays the Start Upgrade screen click on it and the previous screen still displays @ 99% Modifying Software Channels with a message below the bar stating "Asking for Confirmation". Then it exits completly out. No error message is displayed.

[MoonRise]

Further Update: Was able to roll back my sources list and start all over. This time when it got to downloading it failed because of an "Internet" problem and then it rolled everything back itself. The very first time when I did this, it did actually start the download process. I'm wondering now if there are problems with the Repo Servers? I think I'm actually lucky since this never started installing the downloads and must have rolled back itself then and is why I'm OK.

amsri, since it actually started the install process, I don't know if you can roll yours back to Feisty. I've seen several other posts with the similar problems and no solutions. I'm going to keep trying this process on this test machine and see what occurs.

[themusicalguy]

I have a similar issue...

I ran the upgrade instructions to the letter and as you said, the upgrader just closes after the download. I restarted the upgrader and now it just crashes everytime and askes me to file a bug report.

Any news from the Kubuntu team of a known issue or a fix?

[Uber Nooblett]

I had a similar issue with an upgrade to my test install. When I upgraded, it seemed to do so ok, I rebooted, but it doesn't boot into the new kernel and therefore I cannot install the prop NVidia drivers which means that when starting Compiz, it naturally reboots X server.

I've now removed the driver and tried re-installing, but no joy as of course the kernel headers etc installed are newer than the actual kernel being used.

I'm about to remove data from that drive and install a fresh Gutsy to see if its a Gutsy kernel issue or just an upgrade issue, will let you know.

JJ

[themusicalguy]

Quick update...

I managed to get the upgrade to complete by using 'apt-get dist-upgrade' now my system seems to be running Gutsy but lots of things crash (yes I know this is beta software and that's expected) and also I see no new features (e.g. strigi, etc...)

Any news?

[MoonRise]

OK, it seems this Upgrade tool is still very buggy from the last version. Was able to get it back to downloading all of the packages, and it started to do the install. Somewhere in the process it quits. I say somewhere because the Upgrade Tool window froze somewhere near the bigining at 1%. Everything is idle, but I know not to reboot because the upgrade isn't complete. Is there a way to continue this? Can I stop the tool and then restart the tool at a particular point?

[LordKhain]

Hi everyone!!

I had a similar issue running the Upgrade; it downloaded everything but crashed during installation and configuration, exiting with that awful:

"There was an error commiting changes. Some packages or the commit would break packages. "

So I tried with dpkg --config -a, rebooted and tried again until I had to remove a pair of packages, one was kdebluetooth but I cannot remember the other. After that I succeeded to start Adept again and finished to install and configure the remaining packages with no other troubles.

At present, Gutsy is running quite good, but I still haven't had time to test if everything works fine. I can just tell that the Restricted "fglrx" for my ATI seems a bit slow, I have to investigate whether X is correctly installed and configured.

Hope some of this might help.

[MoonRise]

Well, I was able to roll back my sources list. It booted fine as if nothing ever happened. I guess when it froze, it never really got to install much of anything. Really annoying. I'll just wait til official release date. My systems are happy, and all of my tests of Gutsy have been possitive, so I'll wait until I can do the upgrade smoother. Don't rock the boat!!!

[dibl]

I've installed Gutsy from scratch twice now. First Tribe 5 at the end of August, and then Beta 2 days ago. I recall there were enough horror stories with the Feisty upgrade from Dapper or Edgy that I just decided not to try it that way.

The separate /home partition helps a lot -- all the Firefox bookmarks and other things stay pretty intact.

Here's a lesson I learned. When I attempted to install 7.10 Beta over the prior 7.10 Tribe 5 partition, it gave me warnings about files that might be changed, and then there were some dpkg "can't commit" messages and other evidence of flakiness when I finished it. So, I pulled out my GParted Live CD, and re-formatted that partition, and tried again with the Alternate Install CD. When it went onto the clean partition, there were zero issues with the installation.

So, that's how I would recommend folks try it. :)

[wayneddsn]

i did :

kdesu "adept_manager --dist-upgrade-devel"

in the "run" command window on my desktop & laptop & both upgraded fine. I can't remember where I read to do that, but it worked for me.

[MoonRise]

Oddly enough, the upgrade tool from Dapper to Feisty went flawless for me. It was me the last time trying to help but this time has me kinda ticked. I figured they'd have it a little smoother. What really has me stumped is that I can get it to down load all the upgrades, but it continually freezes. Why does it freeze? No error messages or anything. Can't even find a log file. Like I said though, I will try through the Alt Install for the upgrades, my configs don't use a seperate /HOME partition >:( Ahhh. Live and Learn.

[The Liquidator]

My upgrade via the upgrade wizard went OK for me.

[MoonRise]

>:(

Just kidding. Did you go by the "directions"?

I'm wondering if it is hagging up because of the Machine. It's a Celeron 600MHz with 384MB RAM. I really don't think the RAM is an issue, but maybe the processor is on the slow side? It's been a great test machine, but it is 7 years old and it was actually Kubuntu that extended its usefullness.

[The Liquidator]

I wonder whether you might have hit upon something there. I reckon that to use the install wizard (where in my case it downloaded over 1000 packages over some 4 hours prior to installing anything) will require a fair amount of free disk space and (perhaps) memory. Maybe on an old machine there just are not enough resources available to make it work.

Ian

[wayneddsn]

i have 2 dell 1501laptops. both set up for dual boot with windows & both have separate home partitions. they are both set up "the same". the first one upgraded without a hitch. the second one fought me all morning. it kept hanging on the "modify software" (or whatever). i got frustrated & shut it off. I came back about 4 hours later & it upgraded fine. I don't know what to say about that.

[MoonRise]

Well; on my main system I used the ALT CD to upgrade. It went a little better, but the process still froze. Luckily it was at a point that I was able to reboot under the old Kernel and "sudo dpkg --configure -a". That saved the rest and then I was able to update from there through Adept_Manager. I'll probably stick with the ALT CD for this as the network upgrade still seems very unstable and the ALT CD went much faster (download of ISO and burn and actual install all together faster). I only have one problem with what is on my system and I'll post that under software.

Side note: I really like how Gutsy performs and looks. Good job guys!!!!! ;D