.:.

Another Ubuntu upgrade, another critical upgrade bug. I had this idea that letting a solid chunk of time go by before upgrading (in this case, ~4 months) would mean most of the upgrade bugs would be gone. Instead, I was bit in the ass because using the current 7.10 Gutsy kernel (2.6.22-15) means the upgrade process will freeze on the locales package.

The workaround, found by siberoptik on the Ubuntu forums, is to reboot your system with the 2.6.22-14 kernel. Everything is peachy after that. Since I’m working remotely, the way I changed kernels was to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and nuke the lines about the 2.6.22-15 kernel. That made 2.6.22-14 the top-most kernel. By the end of the upgrade none of those kernels will matter anymore anyway. If you are in front of the box, you can just press <Esc> at the grub menu.

If you find yourself in the middle of an upgrade, frozen at “Generating locales…”, all is not lost. Get another shell on the system, look for the process tree (`ps axfw`) with locale-gen running, and kill locale-gen off.¹ For me, the upgrade continued on until the only packages left were ubuntu-minimal and locales. I had to kill off the locale-gen process a couple of more times until the upgrade process was declared “failed”.

At this point I reboot the box and something went awry as it didn’t come back again. It’s unclear from the logs what exactly happened (I was working remotely so couldn’t watch the screen), but after a hard reset I was able to get back in again. Running `dpkg --configure -a` had the locales generate instantly and everything was fine.

The total joke about all of this is, as usual, it’s not documented on Ubuntu’s site in any useful place. Yes, I found it in the forum after I hit the bug and knew what to search for, but it’s a bit late at that point. You’d think there would be a “caveats” or “known problems” or “big nasty critical bugs you should avoid” section on the help page about Hardy upgrades.

In an effort to prevent others from going down this road, I’ve put information in the following places:

• Added a “Known problems” section to the HardyUpgrades help page.
• Added a comment to the update-manager fails 7.10 -> 8.04 LTS question.
• Opened a bug against the update-manager package.

Update (2008.08.19): The bug I filed against update-manager as been made a duplicate of a bug in linux-source-2.6.22. A lot of talk has been happening there and someone claims the developers are working on a fix.

1. IMHO, it’s a good idea to try killing the highest process in the tree and work your way down to the root until you get the result you want. [↩]

Step right up and get your Zabbix 1.4.4 packages for Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)! Packages are available for i386 and amd64 architectures (sorry, I don’t have a powerpc machine). To get them via apt add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list:¹

deb http://packages.devsuki.com/ubuntu/ gutsy main
deb-src http://packages.devsuki.com/ubuntu/ gutsy main

You can also download them manually.

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1. You may want to download the package signing key and add it with apt-key. [↩]

My friend Matt and I have shared a number of stories regarding our frustrations with reporting bugs to Ubuntu. He recently wrote an overview of his experiences — Why I’ve stopped reporting bugs to Ubuntu — which was linked to by OSNews. The comments there are mostly level and reasonable, but some people are missing the focus of his statement. He’s not whining “fix my bug!”, he’s drawing attention to the methodology used to process bugs.

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A small PSA: If you are upgrading Ubuntu to 7.10 “gutsy”, check to see if you have the “evms” package installed. If you do, and you have no knowledge of installing it and don’t know what it is, then you probably should remove it. The consequences of keeping it are a spew of system messages:

device-mapper: dm-linear: Device lookup failed
device-mapper: error adding target to table

Even worse, you may be unable to mount any partitions aside from /! That’s what happened to me.

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While innocently reading the 7.10 Release Notes my left eyebrow raised at their method for creating a new file with a single word in it.

echo letter | sudo tee /etc/papersize >/dev/null

Say what? Why on Earth use tee if you are going to dump it’s output to /dev/null? I assume whoever wrote it ran into a file permission problem due to the redirection.¹ How about the following:

sudo sh -c 'echo letter > papersize'

I’m not going to complain that their way spawns an extra process; I dislike complaints which ignore the capacity of modern computers and that this command is run once by hand. Probably, I just think their way is ugly.

1. The sudo manpage also suggests using sh -c for making redirection work. [↩]