On 12/29/10 22:14, Marc Shapiro wrote:
I have Squeeze on my laptop and have not done an upgrade in quite some time. Today there were 459MB of updates to DL. I said OK to the upgrade and the download went just fine. Then the actual update began. I got a message about lilo and large memory usage. The laptop is only a couple years old, so I answered 'Yes' to let it use the large memory option and rerun lilo. So far, so good. The update continued and I went to do other things. This was going to take a while. When I came back, nothing was happening on the screen. The computer was not locked, but the update had ground to a halt with several messages from syslogd which I should have copied down, but didn't. My bad. I tried to Ctl-C out of aptitude. If I remember correctly, that was successful, but when I tried to restart aptitude I got a message that it had not finished configuring packages (what a surprise) and I should run: dpkg --configure -a I did so, and it continued for a while, then hung up with the message: Setting up fuse-utils (2.8.4-1.1) ... creating fuse group... udev active, skipping device node creation.
. . .A little research (aptitude why fuse-utils) showed that the package was installed automatically as a dependency for ntfsprogs, which was only a recommendation for another package. So I decided to be easy on myself and purge both packages using dpkg. Except ntfsprogs uninstalled and fuse-utils did not. At this point, I decided to risk a reboot, which was successful. After that, I was able to purge fuse-utils using dpkg.
About this time I noticed that my network-manager applet had disappeared and I had no connection. But I still had the network-manager-gnome.deb file to reinstall. Except that after all of these updates, there were two new files to download and I had no connection. This must be why I just leave a cat5 cable plugged into my router! With a cabled connection I was able to reinstall network-manager-gnome. After another reboot I had my connection back.
I'm not entirely sure of the order of things, but another aptitude update and aptitude upgrade found 65 packages that had been downloaded, but not upgraded, and 3 that had been downloaded, but not installed. That actually went fine, this time around. I also decided to uninstall lilo, since the system was booting from grub. But lilo would not uninstall because it could bot find the memtest86+ file. Huh?!? Apparently, memtest86+ was only partially installed, so after reinstalling it, I was finally able to uninstall lilo.
After all that I was able to install virtualbox-ose, which would not install before the massive upgrade and was what reminded me that the upgrade needed to be done.
The moral of the story: Don't let a testing system get that far out of date. Too many packages all attempting to upgrade at once seems to be a recipe for trouble.
Marc Shapiro