Upgrading Ubuntu to 6.06, (Dapper Drake)

I think I have never upgraded (successfully) an operating system. Back when I ran Microsoft Windows and even admined a few of them I used to reinstall the whole system every 6 months or so. That way I did not have to take too much care how much rubbish the developers installed. I did this both using the same version and while upgrading.

Since I started to use Linux I kept replacing distributions every year or so. Once or twice - when I was using Debian - I attempted to move from stable to unstable every time resulting in a fresh installation of the whole machine.

So I was a bit worried.

I had 3 machines with Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger). The graphical Update Manager offers a button to upgrade to 6.06. Pressing it you get a short explanation what will happen and where can you get help and then the rest is nearly automatic.

The first one was a simple upgrade. The machine was installed just 2 months ago and was hardly used. There were hardly any applications on it. I did not worry either as if something went wrong I would only need to reinstall it. There was hardly any configuration or personal files on it.

The upgrade was nearly smooth, during the configuration step the system reported that /etc/login.defs was changed so I had to decide to keep my changes or to upgrade to the one that ships with the new version of Ubuntu.

The second machine was a bit harder. This is my home server with some development tools and many games on it. It had the same issue with /etc/login.defs and in addition at some point near the end, the upgrade suddenly stopped. tetex-base had some problems and the window said installArchives() failed and that my system might be in an unstable state. Not too promising.

Luckily after a short search and a few trial and errors I figured out I have to remove the packages that depend on tetex-base. In my case it was the following:

sudo dpkg --purge docbook-utils
sudo dpkg --purge jadetex
sudo dpkg --purge mailutils

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

sudo install mailutils
sudo install docbook-utils

The third machine - my notebook - is right now under upgrade. It has the most of the packages and right now it seems to be stuck. It is in the Downloading and installing the upgrades phase saying Downloading file 1247 of 1496 It has been like this for over 20 minutes now. I guess the connection to the server is down.

I waited quite a long time till I decided to kill the dapper process. It seems http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ stopped responding. In /etc/apt/sources.list I replaced all occurance of the above URL by one that should be also faster for me: http://il.archive.ubuntu.com/ then started the process again with the graphical Update Manager. I was happy to notice it remembered that the first 1246 files were already downloaded and went on from 1247.

The it had the same issue with /etc/login.defs as the other two and the same problem with tetex as the server. This time I took more detailed notes. If this is relevant for someone.

The error message I got.

Could not install 'tetex-base'
subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1

In the console this appeared:

dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
(the same for tetex-extra)
dapper: Fatal IO error 9 (Bad file descriptor) on X server :0.0.
tetex-base
tetex-bin
tetex-extra
jadetext

The upgrade aborts now. Your system can be in an unusable state. A recovery
was run (dpkg --configure -a).
installArchives() failed

And the solution that worked for me:

$ sudo dpkg --purge tetex
$ sudo dpkg --purge jadetex
$ sudo dpkg --purge docbook-utils

$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

$ sudo apt-get remove libtidy-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libtidy-dev
$ sudo apt-get install docbook-utils

It was a bit scary, but now I think I have three upgraded machines.

Last Update: Tue Sep 25 17:06:26 2007