Summary: I had upgraded my Karmic system to Lucid Alpha 2 and everything
went fine. I had also been applying updates with Update Manager
successfully until about mid-February when a whole bunch of updates came
out. After those updates, my machine would fail to completely boot. Ever
since, I found I
Hmm. Well it doesn't seem to be the updates to e2fsprogs/libs or
mountall. I obtained/prepared packages to roll back those updates after
doing the dist-upgrade and I still had the interminable Waiting for /var
[sm] behaviour, with one less e2fsck invocation being shown on bootup.
So presumably some
I went through one more install/upgrade cycle and found that a) there
appears to be no significant configuration changes in /etc that would be
likely to cause this problem, and b) reformatting /var doesn't appear to
be necessary during a reinstall to clear up the Waiting for /var hang.
That seems t
Sigh, this still happens after all. It just doesn't seem to always
happen right away after an update. Sometimes it needs a few reboots, but
once it happens I can't seem to clear it up without reinstalling Alpha 2
(also appear to need to wipe at least my root partition). I've lost
count of how many
This seems to have actually occurred because I was using the Update
Manager administrative app. It appears that some updates were being held
back requiring a dist-upgrade and some came through as a regular upgrade
even though they required some of the other (new dist) packages. The
Update Manger a
