Problem after upgrading to Buster from Stretch
 

Hello everyone,

I'm using Debian for personal PC. I moved into linux January 2019. Until then I used windows versions. I didn't face any problem before upgrading. I used Stretch version. I updated my debian stretch to buster on 01 August 2019. I didn't knew that there are specific ways to do that, I like using terminal for that sorts of stuff, so I opened terminal type below commands,

01. sudo apt-get update
02. sudo apt-get upgrade

There were about 400MB. After that, some icons had changed. I first noticed nautilus icon on docker changed. So I closed nautilus and tried to open it. But I couldn't. So then I tried to open nautilus through terminal. It gives me below error message,

bash: nautilus: command not found

So then I tried to run different commands, "ls, ls, hibernate, etc..." and non of them works. I started searching on the internet to fix these problems. I didn't find a good solution for nautilus fix. So I installed "Thunar" file manager for temporarily. Then I found a solution for the commands not working error I have, I tried "/bin/ls", and it worked. But not all, still there are lots of commands that not working.

I tried different ways and different solutions to fix my nautilus problem. I'll post below what I see with the commands I give,

root@joseph:/home/joseph# nautilus
bash: nautilus: command not found
root@joseph:/home/joseph# apt-get install nautilus
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
nautilus : Depends: libc6 (>= 2.29) but 2.28-10 is to be installed
Depends: libunity9 (>= 3.4.6) but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
root@joseph:/home/joseph# apt-get reinstall nautilus
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
nautilus : Depends: libc6 (>= 2.29) but 2.28-10 is to be installed
Depends: libunity9 (>= 3.4.6) but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
root@joseph:/home/joseph# apt-get install libc6
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
libc6 is already the newest version (2.28-10).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
root@joseph:/home/joseph# apt-get install libunity9
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package libunity9 is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'libunity9' has no installation candidate

I tried to install gnome to see if it will show me any errors.,

root@joseph:/home/joseph# apt-get install gnome
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
gnome : Depends: gnome-core (= 1:3.30+1) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
root@joseph:/home/joseph# apt-get install gnome-core
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
gnome-core : Depends: nautilus (>= 3.30) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: gnome-sushi (>= 3.30) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
root@joseph:/home/joseph# apt-get install gnome-sushi
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
gnome-sushi : Depends: nautilus (>= 3.2) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

After that, I found a guide to upgrade to buster from stretch. (https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-upgra...bian-10-buster) I checked it and I found, that I need to update the source.list before upgrading. So then I updated the source list and upgraded again. It downloads about 400MB again. But problems still there. It's still the same.

I have no I idea how can I fix this problem. I'm pretty sure that there must be a way to fix these problems without reinstalling the system. But I really really need to fix this somehow without reinstalling.

Feel free to ask me any question and I'll try my best to co-operate with you.

Thank you.

So, give us the output of these commands, run in this order:

Thanks for the quick reply :)
 

"above command gives me nothing."

What you really want is a "dist-upgrade" - the normal upgrade should be done regularly.
Do not run everything as root!
Maybe don't use the terminal at all?
Do you understand the meaning of "Leave well enough alone" and "Don't fix what isn't broken"?
Don't mess with the defaults unless you're 100% sure you know what you're doing.

Generally speaking I get the impression that a hands-on distro like debian is not right for you.
Try Linux Mint or Ubuntu (Lubuntu, Xubuntu) instead, it will make maintenance & upgrading a little easier.

Thank you ondoho
 

I did run "dist-upgrade". But it didn't fix my problem.

I normally use sudo for these kind of commands. But for here, I knew what will be the results, so I run them as root.

I'm not afraid of breaking this. If this broken, I can find a way to fix and I learn more and more from it.

Thank you so much for your reply ondoho. :)

Hello Timothy Miller...

I replied to your post two times. But my reply didn't appear here. Is it because of the text I'm typing? I just copy and paste here command outputs.

Try putting them inside the code tags such as I did. Probably too large a reply without them.

ah now there is the reply. Right after your requested message. I placed it in code tags. Don't know why it takes too much time to appear. But now it's here. :) Thanks Miller. :)

Ok, so your problem is almost definitely due to some of your 3rd party repos/ppa's. Looks like buster is properly installed without any issues for the base system. You should probably clean up the sources.list though, as you've still got references to stretch there, there's pppa's in there (commented out at least), there's a definite possibility of that EVENTUALLY causing issues.

That said, do this. Create a directory (doesn't matter where), and do as root

Thanks Miller...
 

I've done as you said.

And there's a new problem.

I ran apt upgrade and apt dist-upgrade after above results. But there's nothing. If that's some help for you.

Hi,

it seems you still have an Ubuntu ppa in your sources.
For a default Buster system, basically you want:
All of this is covered in the Buster release notes. See https://www.debian.org/releases/bust...pgrade-process

Evo2.

Thanks evo
 

I tried as you said, but the problem still the same.

It downloaded some files. But nothing changed.

Ok, you need to purge the third party packages. The following may help you find them.
Evo2.

Thanks Evo
 

I found these,

What should I do now Evo?

Hi,

ok it looks like you just need to get rid of libnautilus-extension1a. So:
After that you should be able to install nautilus. If not please show what happened, and also the output of the following two commands:
Evo2.

P.S. Are you still having problems with finding basic commands like "ls" in your user account? It seems like your PATH environment variable got messed up somehow.