Bug#695378: upgrade from squeeze to wheezy almost successful.
Package: upgrade-reports
Severity: important
Tags: wheezy
Upgrading 64-but squeeze to 64-bit wheezy on a AMD-64. /boot is (now)
on an ordinary partition, and / is on LVM on RAID.
I started with this upgrade from squeeze to wheezy a few weeks ago. It
has been only partially successful, and the resulting system is not yet
ready to take the place of squeeze on my server. As it stands now,
wheezy will not boot properly without manual intervention, and one
critical applicaiton (gnucash) will not run at all.
Fortunately, I still have a running copy of squeeze on my system, so the
failed upgrade has little effect on day-to-day operation.
This is my second attempt to upgrade from squeeze to wheezy. (The first
was a comedy of errors, mostly mine.)
----------------------------------------
What is wrong when I boot the new system
----------------------------------------
When I boot wheezy, it stops with an initramfs prompt, having waited
unsuccessfuly for the root file system. Now the root file system is on
LVM on RAID. Presumably the LVM did not get activated properly after
the RAID is discovered (I say some discussion of this on an archlinux
bulletin board). The workaround is manual intervention, namely, issuing
the command
vgchange -a y
at the initramfs prompt. It replies,
9 logical volume(s) in volume group "VG1" now active.
I close the shell with control-D, and booting proceeds.
Until it starts to start up gdm. X starts up, and I get a warning popup
telling me
There was an error loading the theme spacefun. Couldn't recognize
the image format for file
'/usr/share/gdm/themes/debian-spacefun/boundingbox.png
I click OK; then am told
There was an error loading the theme, and the default theme could not be
loaded. Attempting to start toe standard greeter.
I click OK. The standard greeter works fine.
--------------------------------------
What's wrong after the successful boot
--------------------------------------
First of all, networking is down. The usual start scripts have indeed
been run from rc.local, but they failed. But manual intervention seems
to help. ifconfig tells me there are no interfaces, which is probably
why setting up masquerading fails. As root, I can issue
ifconfig eth0 up
ifconfig eth1 up
and these interfaces come up nicely. Then I can run the usual local
start scripts and they work properly.
So the problem seems to be that eth0 and eth1 somehos missed the boat
and have nut been started automatically.
Also, the dhcp server isn't working. How do I manually restart it?
----------------------
User software troubles
----------------------
User problems are probably caused by the large number of broken packages
and when that gets resolved this set of problems will probably vanish.
But just for completeness I'll describe the symptoms.
I log in as a user and start my usual icewm.
A lot of the boxes in the toolbar are univorm grey. These are the ones
that I would click on to get 'favorite applications', 'show Desktop',
'Window Lit Menu', 'xterm', and 'WWW'. I can identify them by using the
text that show up when I hover the nouse pointer over them. All that
textt, and the actual text in the menus shows up fine.
The '1', '2', '3', and '4' to indicate alternate workspaces look just
fine.
Starting an xterm using the box that usually has the terminal icon gives
me nothing.
But I can get a terminal with and extremely small font through the menu.
(blank) -> programs -> applicatinons -: Terminal Emulator -> Xterm.
THis is presumably toe ancient xterm that comes with X.
Trying to run gnucash from this sams set of menus fails, wit a large
warning box:
Cannot find default values. The configuration data used to specify
default vaues for gnucash cannot be found n the default system
locations. Without the data gnucash will still operate properly but it
may require some extra time to set up. Do yu wish to set the
configuration data?
THen
An error occurred while loading or saving configuration informatino for
gnucash. Some of your configuraito settings may not work properly.
I can click on Details and get nothing.
I can click on OK and also get nothing.
Asking it to go ahead and set defaults doesn't help.
----------------
Upgrade history.
----------------
I upgraded starting with a copy of the running squeeze system. I
performed tha various checks in the release notes, did the minimal
upgrade and the kernel upgrade. When the time came to reboot I found
that it wouldn't. It took me a week to establish bootability of the
wheezy partition. The problems I ran into were:
* The configuration file for lilo was wrong -- my fault. A disk drive
I had booted from long ago wasn't there any more (it's gone to the
graveyard of aging hard drives) and there was still a stanza referring
to it. I had last run lilo when it was present. Running it during the
upgrade failed: lilo won't accept stanzas that refer to unmounted stuff.
* The configuration file for grub was also wrong. I normally boot using
lilo from floppy, and the grub bootconfiguration had never been tested.
* Although I eventually discovered that wheezy's lilo had no trouble
booting the new 3.* series kernels, squeeze's lilo wouldn't do it.
Something about the something-area not being large enough. And
unfortunately, it was squeeze's lilo that I had to work with.
* But squeeze's grub was up to the task, It took a while to hand-edit
the grub.config file to get it to behave, but that was how I eventually
got the half-upgraded wheezy booted.
After that, apt-get upgraded lots and lots of packages, but not all of
them. Many of the failed packages seem to be related to gnome.
I tried apt-get -f. It gets stuck:
Could note perform immediate configuration on phonon-backend-vlc.
Please see man 5 apt.conf under apt::Immediate-Configuration for details
(2)
Unfortulately I could not find any such section in the output from man 5
apt.conf. Not sure how to proceed now. MAybe the message shoudl be
changed. Many the man page for apt.conf should be changed. Or maybe
this is another thing that didn't get upgraded properly yet.
I tried letting aptitude have a look. It wanted to delete over a
hundred packages before it would do anything, including some that I
regularly use. I declined.
I tried again a week later. Sometimes new packages show up in testing
abd break these logjams. But not this time.
*******
I can provide the logs resulting from my attempts to upgrade if you
would find them useful. They're rather large. I don't *think* they
contain seriously confidential data, but unless it's essential I'd
rather not post them on the web permanently for all to see.
-- hendrik@topoi.pooq.com
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