Possible workaround for potato -> woody upgrade problem
Hi,
A bunch of people on several mailing lists and newsgroups have recently
reported that dselect's install process quits with an "E: Internal error, could not perform immediate configuration" when attempting to upgrade from potato to woody using the CD set. I had exactly the same problem, and found a fairly straightforward way
around it that worked for me. I thought I'd post what I did to this list in the
hope that it will help others with the problem-- though obviously there are no guarantees here. The other workarounds people have suggested, such as starting
with "apt-get install dpkg apt debconf", failed for me with similar
"E: Internal error" messages.
Here's what I did:
After doing "apt-cdrom add" for each of the CD-ROMs in the official
3.0r0 set, I ran:
apt-get install dpkg
This upgraded dpkg and a bunch of other packages, and removed some
other packages. I noted down what was removed. Then I ran:
apt-get install apt
Which gave a lot of strange warnings but worked (though when I first
tried installing apt *before* dpkg, it failed with a "Could not
configure a pre-depend"). As with the previous command, this one
upgraded some packages and removed others, and I recorded what was
removed. Sadly, I didn't think to copy the transcript of the output
from these calls to a file, so I don't have more details on my results.
Then I ran dselect again, reviewed the list of packages I'd selected
for upgrade, and made sure it included all the packages that the two
apt-get calls removed.
This time dselect installed the packages successfully without the "E:
Internal error..." problem. I had some further installation problems,
but they all seemed to be related to my weird GNOME installation
rather than to an apt problem.
From my cursory search on groups.google.com, it appears that many
different people have posted messages about the problem on a variety
of groups and lists in several different languages, seeking help. I'm
not sure how best to propagate this answer to them; any suggestions are
appreciated. I find it hard to believe that this problem is not addressed
prominently in the upgrade instructions for woody, as it appears to have
occurred both before and after the official woody release.
Hope this helps,
Nick Weininger
nweininger@pobox.com
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