[Cialug] Unborking Feisty Fawn

[Brandon Griffis]

Todd,

Glad to hear your success story.  I was a huge Gentoo fan up until about a
year ago.  It seemed like after Danial left the project the updates would
almost always break something and require intervention.  I'm very hopeful
that things will get back on track now that he's back and working on the
project.  I do think that Gentoo is great as a very hands on way to learn
about Linux.

dist-upgrade basically means upgrading your system to the latest
downloadable release.  Basically when you do a regular upgrade you stay on
the same version of the distribution but get security patches and some minor
version updates to programs.  Nothing that requires major dependency
changes.  When you dist-upgrade it uninstalls any old applications and their
dependencies and installs the new version.  It's sort of a "smart upgrade"
basically converting your system to what it would be like if you installed
the newest version of the distro from DVD, while attempting to keep your
config files working.  Usually it is fairly successful at this, but there
has been a time or two that a new version of an app is not compatible with
the old config file and so that's why dist-upgrade is listed as potentially
hazardous.

-Brandon

On 5/5/07, Todd Walton <tdwalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Late last week I got the "updates available" icon on my Kubuntu Edgy
> Eft desktop.  I updated the one package and let it go.  But then it
> came back saying "There's a new version of Kubuntu available!  Feisty
> Fawn is da bomb!  Download Now!"  So I did, and the fawn pooped all
> over my hard drive.
>
> It got only partway through and said there were problems.  It tried to
> back out but then screwed up that too.  I was left with a
> non-operational computer.  When I'd start up, it would dump me to the
> kernel's built in shell, busybox or ash or something.  Well, I'm in no
> state of knowledge to go mucking about manually trying to fix the
> problem and I don't even know what went wrong anyway.
>
> I spent several days pouting and searching the Internet for fixes, to
> no avail.  Nobody seemed to have had this problem, or (more likely)
> nobody seemed to have documented it.  I resigned myself to
> re-installing from scratch (separate /home partition!).  I even had
> Feisty downloaded and a blank CD sitting next to my computer, when
> quick as lightning a flash of insight struck.
>
> >From my Gentoo days I remembered having installed the distro chrooted
> to the new root, but with the kernel and environment of the LiveCD.  I
> thought maybe I could boot into my Ubuntu Edgy CD, chroot to my borked
> install, and fix it.  And so this is what I did:
>
> 1. Boot to the Ubuntu 6.10 LiveCD.
> 2. Set up networking, wireless in my case.
> 3. 'mount /dev/hda5 /media/hda5' (hda5 is my root)
> 4. 'mount -t proc proc /media/hda5/proc' (just in case)
> 5. 'cp -L /etc/resolv.conf /media/hda5/etc/resolv.conf' (just in case)
> 6. chroot /media/hda5 /bin/bash
> 7. apt-get dist-upgrade
> 8. Reboot.
> 9. Drink a cup of coffee.  Happy dance!
>
> When doing the dist-upgrade, I got a bunch of these:
> "cp: cannot stat `/etc/udev/rules.d/85-brltty.rules': No such file or
> directory"
>
> But apparently it wasn't a problem.  I don't understand what
> dist-upgrade does anyway.  Can someone tell me?
>
> I got the idea for chrooting from my Gentoo days.  When installing
> Gentoo it used to be that you'd boot into the LiveCD and then chroot
> to where you wanted to install everything and then do it.  After three
> or four times of installing Gentoo I started to understand what was
> going on.  Well, the idea came back to me here and I tried it.  It
> worked!  Steps 4 and 5 were from the Gentoo documentation.  I'm not
> sure if they were needed in this case.
>
> Lesson 1: All hope is not lost.
> Lesson 2: The thing about Gentoo teaching you Linux is at least partially
> true.
>
> -todd
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