Public bug reported: While upgrading a laptop from Ubuntu 8.10 to 9.04, the user noticed that openoffice.org-writer had taken about 15 minutes to be unpacked. Investigating futher I noticed that the dpkg process was in the uninterruptible sleep state (D). Examining the kernel message buffer with dmesg I saw that several OOPSes had occurred (I'll try to attach the output once I get the laptop up and running again). At this point I decided to reboot; that was a bad idea...
The laptop would no longer boot up. Instead of X starting at the end of the bootup process, there was simply a blank screen. After a few moments I realised that the system was simply sitting on a blank virtual console, and was able to switch to another tty and log in. At this point, I ran startx, but the system froze completely with a black screen and a mouse pointer. I had to hard-reboot; this time, I ran 'update-manager -d' to try to resume the upgrade, but got an error saying that pygtk could not be imported. I doubt the exact cause of this problem will ever be identified, even if it is possible for it to be fixed. Instead, I file this bug to draw your attention to the fact that the present upgrade process is very unreliable. If an upgrade is interrupted, it must not leave the system in a totally unusable state! As a Debian user it is extremely disappointing to see that you have taken the traditional and very reliable 'dist-upgrade' process, and replaced it with some weird, fragile upgrade script that requires working python and X installations. It is also frustrating that there is basically no end-user documentation for the upgrade process. The user gets a funny icon in their notification area, which they click on to trigger the upgrade script... but where are they presented with the release notes, including upgrade and recovery procedures? I'm talking about a document like Debian's: <http://www.debian.org/releases/lenny/i386/release-notes/ch- upgrading.en.html>. It is also very frustrating to see that the fragility of the ugprade process has not improved since I reported bug #108276 for the Feisty upgrade process, two years ago. ** Affects: upgrade-system (Ubuntu) Importance: Undecided Status: New -- Aborted upgrade process left laptop in totally fucked state https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/365485 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
