Stuck between feisty and gutsy

[dbennett]

Since I am on very slow dial-up, my wife burned an alternate CD of the Gutsy distro for me at work. I installed it fresh on a laptop with no problem.

Then I inserted the CD into my feisty desktop machine. It didn't ask about the upgrade so I ran the cdromupgrade sh program as described in the readme. It did step 1 with no problem, then step 2, then fetching the files, then installing the files. Two problems, when "installing" the display line below the progress bar still says "fetching". Second problem, nothing happens at this step. It sets there on 0% for a couple of minutes then the window disappears and nothing else happens.

My feisty desktop machine still works, but when I did an apt-get -s upgrade to check for any security updates it came back with all of the 7.10 (gutsy) files, saying "436 files to upgrade, 0 to remove, 234 not upgraded". So, even though the upgrade failed, it is identifying the OS version as gutsy, but the OS and software is still feisty.

Now what?

[dbennett]

UPDATE Re: Stuck between feisty and gutsy

I thought I'd try something out I saw others who post here had tried: I put the CD into the drive and ran apt-get -f dist-upgrade.

Everything went well... for a while. When it got to updating Kmail, it crashed with a dpkg (1) error. Tried it again and the same thing happened, only this time there was ugliness listed above the actual crash. Things like 294 packages partially installed or removed. And somethings would not work any longer. <sigh>

So I just did a new install. All of my work files are on another drive and I just had to copy over my Konqueror bookmark file and my Kmail messages directory once the new install was finished. It installed fine, but now I have to figure out how to get my Clie syncing with Kontact again.

[marshallbanana]

Re: Stuck between feisty and gutsy

Sorry to hear things didn't quite work out, but you're through the worst of it now. I just thought I'd mention that one thing to check out next time you do an install is creating a new /home partition. It makes future reinstalls possible without any loss of files or settings, very useful.

[dbennett]

FURTHER UPDATE Re: Stuck between feisty and gutsy

OK, I decided that once the install was finished, I'd update the files from the server. I went into Adept and did all the things one is supposed to do (disable the CD, etc.) and started it up. Well, let's just say "stupid" is one description of the product. I'm on a dial-up connection from a small farm in rural, Eastern Kansas so why is Adept starting up 8 file downloads at once? It basically just sits there, timing out on the oldest download and then immediately starting up another one. Only about 75% of them actually get downloaded. That's when the biggest mess starts...

The lovely "the following packages were not completely installed or deleted" message at the end of the Adept run. "Oh, really??" You stupid piece of c%@*. But, all is not lost: apt-get to the rescue. apt-get -f upgrade gets the missing packages and applies them. apt-get -f --reinstall install xxx (uh, any package name that is not completely installed or deleted) and the config program kicks in and sets everything right.

What a short, rocky road that was. Now to get my Zip drive working...