Ubuntu 9.04 – Not all updates can be installed

Ubuntu

I upgraded an existing 8.10 Ubuntu installation to 9.04 last week, and everything appeared to run fine initially. However now on boot I get a dialog box which says 'Not all updates can be installed'. Hitting the 'Partial Upgrade' button the list includes

Install libd4.6-java
Install libd4.6-java-gcj
Install liblrdf0
Upgrade acpid
Upgrade libfreetype6
Upgrade liblucene2-java
Upgrade update-manager
Upgrade update-manager-core

If I then go with install the upgrade the dialog box disappears (after the permission to proceed password prompt) and nothing further happens until the next reboot, when I'm back to the partial upgrade prompt again.

Where should I look to find out what's going wrong and fix this?

Best Answer

Try dropping to a console and doing a dpkg --configure -a which will reconfigure all packages that are awaiting (or previously failed) configuration.

Occassionally you might need to run dpkg multiple times before you get complete success, at which point you can then call an apt-get dist-upgrade to try an install those that didn't previously install.

Basically just repeat those two steps, paying attention to any error messages that might arise, and you'll eventually get a fully updated system. If things really seem to be going wrong you can try apt-get upgrade instead of apt-get dist-upgrade which just tries to upgrade the "current" packages rather than trying to upgrade to the latest Ubuntu release.

The "partial upgrade" button corresponds to apt-get upgrade, while the "upgrade" button corresponds to a "full upgrade". The step that isn't handled by the GUI is dpkg --configure -a and is the most common problem when trying to upgrade and particular packages have jumped a few versions rather than just one.

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