[SOLVED!!] - Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

[flarson]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

Simplified but correct. Go for it.

[RaiCoss]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

Katastrophic Koala.... lmfao.

[Arkad]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

Thief! He stole my title!

[bag]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

Mando hacker - thanks.

Right then - a quick update. I'm in, chrooted and all seems good in the world...

I tried to reinstall the last kernel image (in my case it was 2.6.28-16-generic). This resulted in a bazillion errors - and kicked out a suggestion that I run

sudo dpkg --configure -a

I did that, and it failed showing that there was a failure where "processing was halted because there were too many errors".

I then just ran it again, in the hope that it would clean up if I ran it enough times... hey, what do I know It might...!!!

One of the errors I see as it whizzes past is that it reports that kpackagekit needs packagekit > 0.4.7 but that packagekit was not configured yet. And then it shows that there was an error configuring packagekit so it is leaving it unconfigured... not very helpful...

Sort of stuck in a bit of a cycle here... I tried reinstalling kpackagekit - nope. So I tried reinstalling packagekit - nope... and now I'm running short of ideas...

How do I get kpackagekit / packagekit installed and configured?

One of the other errors I see is that "something or other package" requires dbus but dbus is not yet configured... so I could be on a bit of a long run here.

Nevertheless, if someone can point me in the right direction for getting packages updated and configured then I can iterate through the process until I don't get any more errors and then continue with the original plan of updating and upgrading from the command line...

Please - everyone, your help really is appreciated. I know I'm just coming across more issues each time, but still, I can feel that I'm making progress and I still have great faith that this can be solved at the CLI.

Many thanks once again,

Bag.

P.S. Getting late here, going to get my head down. Please feel free to post full and detailed instructions so that I can crawl myself out of this mess...!!! Cheers folks. Talk tomorrow.

P.P.S Great apologies to Arkad for swiping his Katastrophic Koala phrase - it's so "stand out" that I hoped it would get me some help. And it has. I'm not out of the woods yet though... Besides, it was published under GPL, wasn't it??!!!!!!

[flarson]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

Your instincts were right. You should run "dpkg --configure -a" over and over until you see always the same last message, which is a list of packages that are not configured, and it does not change. As long as the list keeps changing keep running. If it stabalizes with a non zero number of packages we may need to take some specific actions to get them to go.

[bag]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

Thanks mando_hacker - much appreciated.

Right then, so a bit of a newbie question coming up...

I'm used to the CLI. Doesn't bother me at all to go pecking at the keyboard, crossing my fingers and hoping all will work itself out in the wash... However, normally, I use Yakuake inside KDE and so have a natty little scroll bar that allows me to page up and see the history and take my time to read the bazillions of error messages that it spews out.

When doing this at the terminal, without a GUI at all, then error messages fly past at the speed of light and I'm not actually able to see if the list gets shorter or not, or if the error messages change at all.

How do I get to review the error messages and know what's being reported out?

As I say, bit of a newbie question really but I tend to not go to a terminal outside of a GUI so I really don't know.

Any ideas anyone?

Many thanks in advance.

Bag.

[bag]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

OK then, so a bit of an update...

I had a surf and could only find a sort of solution, more or less (please excuse the pun). I understand that piping the output of the command to "less" should give me information on a page by page basis.

Except that it doesn't work in this instance. Data continues to run by at the speed of light, and I am not able to see what information is there. However, I'm pretty sure that it's not getting any quicker, easier or that the list of remaining packages is not getting smaller.

As an aside, I also tried piping the output directly to a file and then reading the file with nano. Clever huh? Well, I thought so!! All the same, it didn't give me much. I got the first eight or ten lines and nothing else... and all the interesting info comes a bit after that, so I'm still none the wiser.

So I've taken a different tack. I've run the command:

sudo aptitude update

and then told it to do a dist-upgrade.

It's working on it now - downloading some recent minor updates (poppler, python and so on...) and working on the rest. Will post what happens later.

Fingers crossed (which is what I'm just about reduced to at the moment...!!)

Cheers

Bag.

[bag]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

Well that didn't quite work out as hoped...

It tried to upgrade and spurted out a load of information - but eventually failed again and halted on too many errors.

I've tried a combination of

sudo dpkg --configure -a

and

sudo aptitude dist-uprgade

which spurts out a load of error messages and seems to always finish with a list of packages. I'm still not able to see if the list is getting smaller though - since it's longer than one screen and I can't seem to get it to stop one screen at a time...

The main issue seems to be trying to either install upgrades or use packages that are not configured (I may be very wrong about this) but this sort of error is what kicks out a lot of info all at once. I'm not able to verify the data in the errors because I can't see it one screen at a time...

So I seem to be stuck. What's next?

Any advice that you can give me would be very much appreciated, as always.

Thanks.

Bag

[flarson]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

We seems to have different schedules. When working at a text terminal you can scroll back using SHIFT-PgUp. That will give you some ability to see what scrolled off the screen but almost certainly not enough. Redirecting STDOUT is getting only the output and not the errors, which come out on STDERR,, so redirect stderr to stdout, which is redirected to a file or tee. That looks like

dpkg --configure -a > config.out 2>&1

or

dpkg --configure -a | tee config.out 2>&1

then look at config.out with less or your favorite editor.

You are moving in the right direction. It might be better to use "aptitude -f install" instead of "aptitude dist-upgrade" until your system gets straightened out. That just tells aptitude to try hard to fix the installation, including downloading and installing what it needs. As long as the combination of these two commands is making progress that is what you should do. Eventually they may quit making progress and then we will have to look at the first error to see what the hold up is. Probably there will be a failed script or something that blocks one package and it cascades from there.

It is likely we can get this fixed, but you might be asking yourself whether or not it is worth it. It is a good learning experience but reinstalling would almost certainly be faster.

[bag]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

Mando_hacker,

Many thanks for all your help. I would suspect that you are in North America somewhere (morning there now), whereas I'm in Africa on GMT+1... that's why the schedules don't seem to match up!!

Your comments are, as always, very helpful. And very much appreciated.

Firstly, to tackle your final comment - about whether it's worth it to reinstall cleanly from my CD-ROM or not...

I'm aware that it would obviously be much quicker - and that it would save me a lot of time - to just do a complete reinstall, but I'm also really enjoying the learning experience of trying to fix it from the command line. It's refreshing to know that even if a system is completely borked, it can actually be repaired, (almost) no matter how bad it is - as long as you have the time and know-how to do so.

My big problem is that I don't have the know-how, so I rely on the kindness of your good self and others to hand-hold me through the process and give me guidance as I hit each new brick wall.

I'm quite willing to spare another four or so days without my system whilst I try and fix it the hard way - as long as you're not going to get too bored with me and would be willing to keep posting pointers and encouragement. One thing is clear though, without help, I am unlikely to be able to rescue this alone.

So then, if you're up to keep posting advice and guidance, I've got the time and energy to keep going.

I am at work now (naughty naughty - on the net from work!) but will try your suggestions later. Will see how it goes - and will investigate information about the errors. I suspect that I may be already close to the end of the iterative fixing process - based on nothing more than the fact that error messages _seem_ to be the same again and again and that the time to complete and fail over is about the same each time. Will verify tonight when I can review the output from a text editor.

At the very least, will try to use the "sudo aptitude -f install" and see if it can't force it to fix a few things...

Will keep you posted.

Many thanks,

Bag.

[flarson]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

Sounds good to me. Let's do it.

[henyh]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

This thread got my kubuntu working again. Thanks!

What I did (as I remember it)

1) Booted from live cd 9.10

2) had the old root mounted by clicking it in Dolphin

3) Pressed Ctrl-Alt-F1, and stopped kdm

4) chroot to my old root

5) typed 'dpkg --configure -a' and 'aptitude -f full-upgrade' a couple of times with lots of error messages.
One of the common errors was some problem with permissions for /dev/null, and in a other thread I read it could be fixed with a 'rm /dev/null'. So i tried the rm /dev/null and run 'dpkg --configure -a' and 'aptitude -f full-upgrade' a couple more times. There were still lots of errors and I thought I was stuck and rebooted.

6) However, this time I could choose to boot 2.6.31-14 from GRUB. It loaded for a while and ended at a login prompt.

7) Logged in and typed 'sudo dpkg --configure -a' and 'sudo aptitude -f full-upgrade'

8) rebooted - and this time Karmic Koala started as it should.

[bag]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

Henyh - glad to hear that you're through to the other side... Great news. I just hope to get there too soon... May try and just reboot sometime soon to see if I have the option of a new kernel - although I doubt it because my output doesn't mention it at all...

Mando_hacker...

Right then, I'm back...

I've run both a "dpkg --configure -a" and also a "sudo aptitude -f install" and output them to files that I've been able to review in nano.

Right then, "dpkg --configure -a" starts off by saying that it cannot resolve host ubuntu...
Then it kicks straight into dependency problems preventing configuration of pulseaudio-module-udev.
It then goes on to say that it depends on a version that is newer than the one installed. It gives a "dpkg: error processing puleaudio-module-udev (--configure):" and that it will then leave it unconfigured.

This is the first of a long list of such items...

Then it goes on to try and set up nvidia-185.18.36 DKMS files... but has a problem with "/usr/sbin/dkms: line 107: /dev/fd/62: No such file or directory".

Then it tries building an initial module for 2.6.31-14-generic but fails on an error with a bad return status for the module. "subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 10"

Then it goes through a whole pile of files where it is not able to configure dependencies (as above) and finishes with a list of 51 packages that threw up errors.

So then, that was the first one - for the other input (sudo aptitude -f install > config.out-f-install 2>&1), I got the following:

1. Unable to resolve host ubuntu
2. A list of NEW packages that will be installed.
3. A list of packages that will be removed.
4. A list of packages that will be upgraded.
5. A list of partially installed packages that will be configured. (152, I counted them!)

413 packages upgraded, 127 newly installed, 12 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
It needs to get 0B, but after unpacking it will use 107MB of space.

It then complains that:

dpkg-preconfigure: unable to re-open stdin:
Can not write log, openpty() faied (/dev/pts not mounted?)

Then it tries to run scripts (for the first file on the list - pulseaudio-module-udev) - but the pre-removal script returned an error exit status 1. (action "stop" failed).

This happens (same errors) for several of the initial packages, then it tries to do exactly the same as the command dpkg --configure -a from earlier and tries to install the packages - running into problems each time with the same issues - it's not able to configure the file, so it leaves it unconfigured.

I've run each command twice, and reviewed them in nano - and I can't see any improvement at all. It just seems to be stalled at this...

So then - how are we doing? What would be a good place to start?

Is the fact that it cannot write a log important? Is it a pre-removal script for the old version of pulseaudio-module-udev that needs replacing from an archive somewhere and then rerunning?

If someone can give me some pointers, then I would be very grateful.

Many thanks,

Bag

[flarson]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

The problems I see start with the inability to resolve a hostname which is either your hostname or the hostname of the ubuntu repository. That seems to say you have not network in the chroot. You are also seeing messages about no /dev/xxx and can not seem to build the initrd that is needed to boot, maybe because the building of the nvidia module is failing. What a mess.

Log out of the chroot and in the original terminal mount some filesystems so that they are available in the chroot. If your chroot is mounted on /portable you would use

mount -o bind /dev /portable/dev
mount -o bind /proc /portable/proc
mount -o bind /tmp /portable/tmp
mount -o bind /sys /portable/sys
mount -o bind /dev/pts /portable/dev/pts

This should give you access to these in the chroot. Now chroot again and try the commands. You may have better luck this time. If it allows the initrd to build it is probably time to reboot, after you copy the initrd.img to your real /boot location.

If they do not work lets find out if your network works. can you "ping yahoo.com" in the chroot? not in chroot?

[bag]

Re: Katastrophic Koala upgrade - system completely borked...

Interesting... I can't ping anything...

I'm surprised that it's not working - because at lunchtime I was able to download updates when trying to upgrade packages...

I've also thought about another thing, related to not being able to access some /dev's... I didn't connect to /dev's, I chrooted into a /media/disk-1 - which I believe is just a symlink but still, would that have made a real difference?

It's just that when I was in the graphical interface with the CD-ROM live CD, I wasn't able to easily determine the /dev/whatevers - only that they were mounted on /media/diskXXXX

So then, now I'm confused - and my lack of CLI knowledge is hitting me. When you say that chroot is mounted on something, what exactly do you mean..? I believe that the command I input when chrooting was something like: chroot /media/disk-1

So what would that mean in terms of mounting / binding other filesystems??

Sorry - going backwards in my knowledge here.

Finally, pinging outside of the chroot environment doesn't work either... Maybe I should reboot? It was definitely working before (I posted to you from inside the LiveCD environment last night).

Cheers.

Bag