Hey;

On the sevententh I upgraded to Ubuntu 13.10 from 13.04. I used the regular upgrade routine and all seemed to be going smoothly. Then early yesterday I beleive there was a problem with upgrading the browser Google Chrome, which was one of my Internet browsers. Here I am afraid to say my memory may be suspect. It is quite possible I interrupted the upgrade some how. In any case I unistalled Google Chrome stable then ran an update through the terminal.
I spent the next several hours doing my thing. Then late in the afternoon I opened Dash to check the Software Updater as is my routine and was surprised to see not one but two Software Updater icons.
I clicked both the first one ran normally in that small window giving me a no updates available indication. The second one however came up with this:

"Could not get a list of Distribution Upgrades
Failed to process request."

There was more:

"The backend exited unexpectedly. This is a serious error as the spawned backend did not complete the pending transactiion."


I do not know what it could mean other then the upgrade being refered to was Google Chrome. I went back an opened Dash and noticed this:

The two icons one reads; 'Softerware Updater' and the other read; 'Software Update'. I did not notice this before when I opened Dash. It was the second one 'Software Update' which had the warning.

I went to the Ubuntu Software Center where I find "Software Update" icon and when i click on it i got this:

Software Update
'Update software installed on the system'

Clicking on it, this came up:

"NOT FOUND
There isn't a software package called “gnome-update-viewer” in your current software sources."

Now comes the big question that being should I take notice of the warning the "Software Update" shows or ???

herakles_14

Install aptitude and use that to upgrade your system. Much safer than the Update Manager

andrewthomas;

Perhaps I should have used aptitude to upgrade but that is a should have, I am left with what I did and the what to do about the 'Software Update' and its warning?

Before I logged in to this site I ran in the terminal an update followed be an upgrade, the update ended with no errors or anything out of the ordinary as to the upgrade it showed there was no upgrade was available.

I have seen elsewhere when you need to remove an App or something there is a commandline that can be used. I have an idea what it may be but have not tried for a couple reasons one of them by doing so I may make matters worse then they already are.

How bad are thingsd, really, and should that warning be taken seriously or ignored? On the former is what I need help with.

While aptitude is certainly better than using the dodgy gui ubuntu foists on your, you don't need it. Apt-get is the recommended package upgrade and version upgrade tool for Debian since the release of Squeeze (Ubuntu 10.04). Take your pick though, either is MUCH better if not as automated. The automation is the problem.

One thing you need to do, no matter what you do a version upgrade with is to get rid of any packages installed by ppa's and other outside sources and remove or comment out their entries in your /etc/sources.list. Read the upgrade instructions for your version on the ubuntu site, it will tell you the same thing.

You are much better off getting the new release ISO and using the "update" or "upgrade" "your current system" (can't remember what they call it and has probably changed since I used their stuff anyway. That is safer because it starts with a clean sources.list and is not, once downloaded, vulnerable to shaky internet connections.

As for your current problem. Clean up your sources.list. Remove outside packages like your Google Chrome package. You should save all your ~/.foo files for those removed packages as they are your user config files and will be handy to reconfigure them right back to what they are currently (you can see those files by hitting Ctrl + h in your home directory). When you have done that open a terminal and run;
hopefully this will start to straighten things out. Will probably have a list of things it didn't fix. Run it until that list stays the same.

Reboot to recovery mode. Ubuntu, the retards of security, will dump you, finally, at a root prompt asking for no password what so ever. Run at that prompt;
no sudo needed you are logged in as root and have the root prompt (#).

If this doesn't give a clear bill of health and still has some packages listed as not configured, run this;
If that doesn't get all of them try the dpkg command again (hitting your up arrow twice should bring that command up at the prompt) and if that doesn't do it try the apt command again (up arrow again twice probably).

If you are still getting no where enter;
and once again boot recovery mode. Try it all again.

If that doesn't clear the packages post again and we can try some other things. Or you could decide that reinstalling and reconfiguring would be faster and do that.

People just don't seem to get what a complex job it is to install or do a version upgrade. These are seriously complex procedures executed by automated scripts. They work, usually, on most hardware out there and modestly altered from standard distro packages. When it screws up due to people not reading the release notes (I rarely do) or the upgrade notes and following instructions which really can and do differ from release to release it is a bugger to fix them. It usually, though, can be done and some even consider it rather fun. I do.

But try that stuff, make your choice as to whether to continue or not and let us know.

2 members found this post helpful.

EDIT: I see that widget beat me to it. Just ignore.

Let us see where you are.

Open a terminal window and cut and paste the following code

Then cut and paste the output of the second command after saying N to the Do you want to "Upgrade the following packages?"

andrewthomas

ran the 'sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade' At the end I got;

'Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.'

Widget,

ran the 'sudo dpkg --configure -a' and all i got was; bill48@bill48-Dimension-9100:~$, kept getting that after several rounds. I apparently have nothing to upgrade, I did have a package removed with the 'apt-get -f install'. Then came the rest and as it stands I stand no hits no runs an no upgrades.

However I still have one 'Software Updater' and one 'Software Update'. The Software Update still giving me the error message as stated before. What now?

It sounds like you have dpkg and apt-get working. This sounds good.

I have no idea how to straighten out the "software update" which I assume is part of the software center. I ran the thing in 10.04-testing because it needed tested. Didn't think much of it then and haven't seen it since.

Probably removing the software center package(s) and the update manager packages and then reinstalling them would work but I don't think you can do that without removing most of your system.

You could look in your ~/.foo files for files that relate to those applications and rename them or move them to some other place. If you find and remove them without getting rid of them you can put them back. With them renamed or moved to someplace else they will not be used. Reboot.

That should regenerate those files. Hopefully that will clear it.

wdget,

I had no idea of how to remove the 'Software Update' without risking a calamity. So I wiped everything out by reinstalling my former Ubuntu 13.04. Before I moved the folders and stuff I wanted to save onto a usb flashdrive. After the 13.04 was full installed I tried to use the command: 'sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade' which andrewthomas offered, to install the distro upgrade but it came out with nothing to upgrade. That apparently being the case i opened the one an only 'Software Updater' clicked on it. It ran its routine and that time no updates but it did tell me that a upgrade was available, and to make a longg story even longer I clicked on the upgrade and as they say the rest is hysteria.

Very good.

To do a version upgrade you need to first edit your /etc/sources.list to call for the new version. This can be done manually, it can be done in most text editors with a "search and replace" tool and can be done in terminal with this, edited to reflect your current and target version;
That is referring to Debian Squeeze and Debian testing. So you would put in the code name for your Ubuntu version in place of squeeze and then the code name for the next version in place of testing.

If you wanted to do the whole thing at once it would be like this;
What andrewthomas was offering was a way to see if any stray packages needed upgraded still.

In doing a normal package upgrade in your new system you would be better off to learn to use the terminal. That command that andrewthomas gave you would work for that.

There are 3 basic commands for upgrading packages.

apt-get update = updates your package list (list of packages available in your versions repos).
apt-get upgrade = will upgrade all packages that need upgraded only
apt-get dist-upgrade = will upgrade all packages including those that need other packages installed or removed from your system.

When you use any gui package upgrading system it is simply a script to use the;
command.

Do you really want a script running something like that? In your version upgrade there were mistakes made. It was using the command I gave;
but was confused somehow by 3rd party packages, something in your sources.list that was not quite right, who, at this point really knows.

Doing it manually is a little awkward at first but gives you continuous information as it works. You can even stop it if it looks funny to you if you are watching it (Ctrl + c). Not a real good idea to stop it as some things may be finished and so you would be screwed but there are times that is better than letting it complete.

If it finishes and is not right, and your terminal is still open or you kept a copy of all the out put, it is much more likely that things can be fixed.

Scripts are a wonderful thing. You need to remember that the package management scripts are written with the assumption that you are using the official repos for all your packages. If you are not things can get dicey.

Have fun with your new version.

Thanks and I hope this time around I don't screw things up.

I'm going to copy your letter and its commands, if or when I make an upgrade I will have some thing to help me make it through.

herakles_14