Ubuntu Wiki

Problems upgrading kubuntu Breezy => Dapper

* The Adept `Manage Repositories' system is very unfriendly and unhelpful. See Malone 46957 for some problems.

• Additional problems:
  1. it is very difficult to edit the `distribution' field: you have to click just so and then edit the text and then you have to hit return before clicking on the next field (or it undoes your change).
  2. This is compounded by the need to edit many lines in a very similar way which is tedious and time-consuming.

  3. This is compounded by the need to click Apply' before Close'; if you don't, it silently discards your changes.

  4. There is no way via the gui to supply a new cdrom source if you want to avoid downloading the whole of dapper !

* Adept is generally confusing. It provides no confirmation after a long upgrade operation that it was successful; it's hard to predict what it's going to do; etc.

* After the upgrade has been completed the desktop is _completely hosed_. _Nothing works at all_. Even attempting to reboot failed with numerous error messages about missing files, segfaults, etc. etc. etc. I gave up and switched to a text mode console and hit C-A-D and the resulting system seems fine (although I haven't done the tests yet).

• The fact that KDE doesn't work after an upgrade is known (I'm told), although my inability to get it to reboot is new. I'll try to reproduce the latter. -iwj

This time I tried it again. I used kconsole to edit my sources.list and upgrade from breezy to dapper 20060531. After the upgrade, I tried to log out from the menu and the screen went black apart from a dialogue box saying `The application The KDE Session Manager (ksmserver) crashed and caused the signal 6 (SIGABRT)'. I asked for a backtrace but it couldn't do that as I didn't have gdb installed. Dismissing the dialogue left me at a text console prompt.

Recommended fix

* Tell the users to do the upgrade from a terminal window

1. run apt-cdrom add
2. edit the sources.list to (a) remove the breezy cdrom source (b) change every breezy to dapper
3. apt-get etc.
4. init 6

A Disasterous Breezy->Dapper upgrade experience

We just had a lousy experience. To start with we followed the instructions on the Kubuntu 6.0.6 release announcement - which are quite inadequate. I wish I'd read DapperUpgrades first, I might have approached things differently.

In our case Adept actually crashed with "Confguring KDE", message was along the lines of 'KDM seems to managing at least one X session ... should KDM be restarted" with Yes and No options. However whatever we did, it did not respond - Y, N, Enter, Tab, arrow keys etc all did nothing, and mouse clicks did text selection. We eventually killed Adept, went to a command line, killed all the apt and dpkg-related processes, then did dpkg --configure - a and apt-get dist-upgrade - f. Not particularly friendly and although my wife is competent, this is way beyond what she should be expected to cope with. But it was worse, when upgrade was complete, I checked out that it would reboot and the system logged into text mode - no graphical login? What? startx brought up a blank X display with the console still occupying the top left corner.

I now suspect this was because we had KDE 3.5 installed on top of Breezy, then when setting up Dapper in sources.list, uncommented the kde35 source from it. The dist-upgrade (done from Adept) then perhaps removed all of KDE 3.5, but didn't put it back? This is only a theory of course. We're now in the process of sitting through "apt-get install kubuntu-desktop" in the hope that this fixes it (although it is taking a VERY long time downloading a lot of packages at 256kbps). If this doesn't work, I'll conclude the system is hosed and start from scratch. Fortunately all the networking and so forth stayed up, so we have a lot of options.

Update: ok, that worked (apt-get install kubuntu-desktop)