Friday, 30 August 2013

Linux Mint - Upgrading from Maya(13) to Olivia(15)

I thought I'd give this unsupported upgrade a go to see if it would actually work.  Wow, just as I thought, it totally nose dived!  I love you Debian, for all your flaws.  Anyway, all was not lost.  The failure occurred as a result of glibc6 being uninstalled without being replaced by the upgraded glibc6.  Something went horribly wrong after uninstall, when something couldn't be restarted as a result of not having glibc6 available; yet another argument that suggests package managers should queue post install scripts until the end of installing all packages rather than trying to do a half arsed install and messing it up.

Anyway, since aptititude kindly caches all the downloaded packages in /var/cache/apt/archive, it was easy to reinstate a working glibc6, providing I didn't reboot!

$ dpkg -i $(ls -t1 /var/cache/apt/archive/*glibc6*.deb | head -1)
 After that, just running the dist-upgrade again managed to get the upgrade merrily on its way.  So my tip of the day:

No matter how bad you think the situation is, you can make it worse by hitting the reset button!

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