Beware of today's upgrade will kill kde

[Fintan]

I did my upgrade today without paying much attention, well I should have.

It uninstalls all of xserver-xorg packages and a few other thingsand then it tells me it is updating KDM and to choose stop KDM. This puts me into a cli. Obviousely I could not get back to the desktop and doing sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop just gives me a hige list of packages it will install but won't.

dpkg from recovery mode does not help either.

So fo now (until a non-broken upgrade) I will wait

[blackpaw]

Re: Beware of today's upgrade

Yeah I got bit by this one too Fortunately just in a VM. Should have snapshotted though.

[kubicle]

Re: Beware of today's upgrade

There was a warning about in ubuntu devel mailing lists:

Subject: Upcoming X breakage
Date: Mon, 07 Jun 2010 10:00:48 +1000

Summary for the impatient:
************************************************** ******************
A new X server is about to be uploaded which requires all the
drivers to be rebuilt. Be careful when upgrading in the next few
days.
************************************************** ******************

So far in Maverick X has been a relatively sedentary beast, not much
changed from Lucid. It's time for X to get a bit more interesting…

We're going to be merging the new 1.8 X server and associated drivers
from Debian over the next couple of days. This server has a new input
and video ABI, which means existing driver packages will break.

The server needs to be uploaded first so the new drivers build against
the correct ABI, which means that there will be a period where safe
upgrades will have held-back packages. The dependencies should ensure
that you won't accidentally get a non-working combination of Xserver and
drivers, but be careful if an upgrade wants to remove X packages.

There will be another X transition later in the Maverick cycle when we
switch to X server 1.9. I'll send out a similar notice then, too.

Happy testing!

It's a good practice to follow the devel lists if you run the devel version (or be very careful when upgrading ). You can probably recover your installation once all xorg packages can be upgraded.

[timek718]

Re: Beware of today's upgrade

Well, having been burnt (sometimes badly) in the past by partial upgrades, I figured out a couple of ways of protecting myself from my carelessness.

Using the current xserver situation as an example. My way of doing this relies on synaptic, it might work for other package managers. Synaptic allows you to lock packages. Find all the installed xserver packages & with all of the relevant packages selected: Package==>Lock Version.

I don't think this is a perfect solution, if for no other reason than that it is possible to get distracted & forget that these packages have been locked.

The other other way of dealing with this, is simply not to do any upgrades at all if any packages are held back or if any packages are uninstalled without a carefully examining the situation.

If you have your home directory on a separate partition and a backup of annoying-to-replace system config files, then a reinstall shouldn't be terribly challenging.

I know it's cold comfort after the fact. But if you're going to live on the bleeding edge, just remember who's most likely to do the bleeding.

Now, if only the KDE 4.5 Beta 2 SC packages would finish building ....

[kubicle]

Re: Beware of today's upgrade

Now, if only the KDE 4.5 Beta 2 SC packages would finish building ....

According to the build logs, most of the beta2 packages failed to build on maverick. They'll be fixed eventually, I'm sure.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Beware of today's upgrade

I let Synaptic do the upgrade:

Commit Log for Wed Jun 9 15:35:08 2010

Upgraded the following packages:
gstreamer0.10-plugins-good (0.10.21-1ubuntu2) to 0.10.21-1ubuntu3
kpackagekit (0.5.4-0ubuntu4) to 0.5.4-0ubuntu4.1
kubuntu-default-settings (1:10.04ubuntu23.1) to 1:10.04ubuntu23.2
libgssapi-krb5-2 (1.8.1+dfsg-2) to 1.8.1+dfsg-2ubuntu0.1
libk5crypto3 (1.8.1+dfsg-2) to 1.8.1+dfsg-2ubuntu0.1
libkrb5-3 (1.8.1+dfsg-2) to 1.8.1+dfsg-2ubuntu0.1
libkrb5support0 (1.8.1+dfsg-2) to 1.8.1+dfsg-2ubuntu0.1
libmysqlclient16 (5.1.41-3ubuntu12.1) to 5.1.41-3ubuntu12.3
libsdl1.2debian (1.2.14-4ubuntu1) to 1.2.14-4ubuntu1.1
libsdl1.2debian-alsa (1.2.14-4ubuntu1) to 1.2.14-4ubuntu1.1
linux-firmware (1.34) to 1.34.1
mysql-client-core-5.1 (5.1.41-3ubuntu12.1) to 5.1.41-3ubuntu12.3
mysql-common (5.1.41-3ubuntu12.1) to 5.1.41-3ubuntu12.3
mysql-server-core-5.1 (5.1.41-3ubuntu12.1) to 5.1.41-3ubuntu12.3
plymouth-theme-kubuntu-logo (1:10.04ubuntu23.1) to 1:10.04ubuntu23.2
xserver-common (2:1.7.6-2ubuntu7) to 2:1.7.6-2ubuntu7.1
xserver-xorg-core (2:1.7.6-2ubuntu7) to 2:1.7.6-2ubuntu7.1

So far, no problems.

[Fintan]

Re: Beware of today's upgrade

Well a few hours of fruitation can make a difference

I'll try again

[kubicle]

Re: Beware of today's upgrade

I let Synaptic do the upgrade:

Commit Log for Wed Jun 9 15:35:08 2010

Upgraded the following packages:
...
xserver-common (2:1.7.6-2ubuntu7) to 2:1.7.6-2ubuntu7.1
xserver-xorg-core (2:1.7.6-2ubuntu7) to 2:1.7.6-2ubuntu7.1

So far, no problems.

Those look like the latest 1.7 packages (for lucid perhaps?), it's the 1.8 upgrade (on maverick) one should be careful about.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Beware of today's upgrade

Darn! I didn't notice that this was the Maveric Meerkat section.

[blackpaw]

Re: Beware of today's upgrade

Whole slew of updates this morning, X server seems to be back in shap, though I had one failed startup but the next boot worked ok. I'd definitely test any big updates with a VM before doign a real desktop

Really like the KDE 4.5 Beta 2, very tempted to upgrade my 10.04 desktop to it.

[starbetrayer]

Re: Beware of today's upgrade

Impossible for me to login in Kde in a vmware workstation machine. any ideas guys ?

[blackpaw]

Re: Beware of today's upgrade

Impossible for me to login in Kde in a vmware workstation machine. any ideas guys ?

What's happening? or not happening?

[starbetrayer]

Re: Beware of today's upgrade

ok i booted in root, logged in the system and did "startx"

Xis not happy and replying with a segmentation fault, I will fill out a bug report.

Careful guys, with a virtual machine and X.

[Fintan]

Re: Beware of today's upgrade

Got my desktop back after today upgrades.

Plasma has to be re-configured after ever boot
Both in maveric and in Lucid KDE4.5 beta2.

Found a neat drawer widget

Really like the KDE 4.5 Beta 2, very tempted to upgrade my 10.04 desktop to it.

I would wait on that one for a while.

[blackpaw]

Re: Beware of today's upgrade

I would wait on that one for a while.

Actually I did it this evening, has worked out quite well Switched to console for the upgrade, let it do its thing. Took a note of what was removed. Did update/dist-upgrade successively until it stopped doing upgrades (several goes).



Installed kdeplasma-addons and kdebase, which dragged back all the stuff uninstalled and rebooted. Seems to be work pretty good now.

Had to manually edit kdmrc to renable autologon.