SOLVED: Upgrade stopped mid way the process with error 127

[barbolani]

This one looks serious. I have two machines, with identical hardware but with a different selection of packages installed.

Yesterday I upgraded one of them to 10.10 without problems by just clicking on the upgrade link on KPackageKit.

Judging by the flawless installation (so good that I'm writing this from the upgraded machine), this morning I clicked on the upgrade link on the other machine. It started the usual process downloading the packages and after 40 minutes it started the upgrade.

Then KPackageKit stopped announcing that the upgrade process had failed with error 127.

Running

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

I get hundreds of lines of error messages for unsatisfied dependencies.


The machine is turned on, but KPackageKit does not launch. Neither do a lot of icons I've tried. It looks that it has stopped in the middle of the upgrade. Followin the advice given at the end of the errors in

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

I've issued a

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -f

And it has presentem me with two screens worth of new and updated packages. At the end, it is asking if it should proceed.

I've answered "Yes", I'm getting myself in trouble? (or more trouble than I'm already in?)

[dibl]

Re: Upgrade stopped mid way the process with error 127

I've answered "Yes", I'm getting myself in trouble? (or more trouble than I'm already in?)

No worries -- you're in so deep already, it can't get any worse.

Seriously, worst case is you'll have to reinstall the OS. Hopefully any data are backed up.

[barbolani]

SOLVED: Upgrade stopped mid way the process with error 127

To the thousands of souls anxiously waiting for news (that's you, dibl), here's an update:

After issuing the sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -f, the command completed sucessfully with a few stops to ask if I wished to keep some configuration files on their versions, etc. A sudo reboot later, the machine booted without any issues.

I'm now writing this from my upgraded machine and looking at the new fonts and thinking that they are a good idea from an usability point of view. They are legible and take less space.

The only question left is then, why the upgrade stops with an error that is not actually an error. Well, it's either a non error or an error that should be documented as "when you see this error, don't reboot the machine or anything else, just open a console and issue a sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -f"

I'm not one of those Open Source whiners that is always saying that "until it has an equivalent to <insert your favourite Windows package> that works exactly the same I'm not going to switch to Linux". But install/upgrade issues should be deeply diagnosed and tested. It's not going to be a good experience for a newbie on its first upgrade to encounter this kind of error. And he/she may not be as lucky as I've been. And more so when the "error" is not such an error or at least it can be solved by simply restarting the upgrade procedure.

[dibl]

Re: SOLVED: Upgrade stopped mid way the process with error 127

To the thousands of souls anxiously waiting for news (that's you, dibl)

The barbolani fan base is delighted (and relieved) to hear about your sucessful results!

Google turned up so many hits on "upgrade process has failed with error 127" that I almost despaired of discovering anything useful. Usually when you see something like that, it is a message that was designed more to help the developer debug his script than to help a typical user. In this case, I think you can get idea by reviewing this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1346497

At least that's what I suspect. Good job -- glad it ended successfully.