Ubuntu upgrade

• Upgrade from 20.04 to 22.04
  • Preparation
  • Upgrade
  • Clean up
    • Issues
    • Edit configuration files
    • Re-enable repositories

Upgrade from 20.04 to 22.04

25 Feb 2024

Preparation

Ensure system is up to date:

apt update
apt upgrade
apt autoremove
reboot

chmod -x /etc/cron.hourly/fog_back
chmod -x /etc/cron.hourly/fog_mirror

Closed applications that I had running and disconnected VNC from mugwort.

Upgrade

The upgrade itself was done talking directly to sage (using TV as display).

Following these instructions I attempted to upgrade using GUI application:

update-manager -c

This seemed to be proceeding OK - downloaded packages (don't know where to) and apparently started to install them, but then everything froze. I had to reboot.

I tried using:

do-release-upgrade

But this didn't work since the previous attempt at upgrading had been interrupted. However, doing:

lsb_release -a

showed that to the system had been switched to Ubuntu 22.04, and the file /etc/apt/sources.list showed 'jammy' (the 22.04 repository) as the main source.

So I proceeded with the upgrade using:

apt upgrade
apt autoremove
reboot

Whenever I was prompted about modified configuration files, I opted to keep my old version. It seemed simpler to edit them after the upgrade rather than during.

The system rebooted but several issues were immediately apparent - see below

Clean up

Issues

Several issues were apparent after the upgrade:

• The vnc.frank service wasn't running. Fortunately the VNC to the main display was working, so I was able to use that while investigating and fixing problems.
  FIXED. There were two problems.
  Had to change the PID filename in '/etc/systemd/system/vnc.frank.service' from 'sage.wingpath.co.uk:1.pid' to 'sage.wingpath.co.uk:5901.pid'.
  A DBUS message was timing out - fixed by switching to 'dbus-broker' as suggested by this thread:
        apt install dbus-broker
        systemctl enable --global dbus-broker.servic
        systemctl start vnc.frank
• spamc wasn't complaining that it couldn't connect to spamd.
  FIXED by finishing the package upgrade - see below.
• systemd-udevd was complaining: /lib/udev/rules.d/50-udev-default.rules:42 Unknown group 'sgx', ignoring.
  FIXED by finishing the package upgrade - see below.
• encfs segfaults when I try to mount ~/private_raw.
  FIXED by editing /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf to include the "legacy provider". See OpenSSL 3.0 release notes.
• Thunderbird and Terminal were both opening web pages in Firefox instead of Chrome, even though Chrome thinks it is the default browser.
  FIXED by changing all occurences of 'exo-web-browser' in '~/.config/mimeapps.list' to 'google-chrome'.
• Was getting several lines "cupsd[...]: Unable to read "/var/snap/cups/common/etc/cups/cupsd.conf" due to errors." in syslog at boot time.
  FIXED Found from this thread that the snap version of cups should not really be installed, since I am using the non-snap version, and that it was the chromium snap that was pulling in the cups snap. Since I am now using google-chrome instead of chromium, I removed both the chrome and the cups snaps.

Further investigation showed that many packages (over 150) had not been upgraded, and the system had been left with inconsistent dependencies.

I tried:

apt --fix-broken install

but this complained about dependency problems without actually fixing them.

After studying many forum threads without finding any simple solutions, I developed a strategy of repeatedly doing:

apt upgrade
apt autoremove

with occasional:

dpkg --force-all --remove <packages>

to forcibly remove one or two packages that appeared to be causing dependency problems.

At one point I also tried adding the 'focal' (20.04) repositories to '/etc/apt/sources.list', in addition to the 'jammy' (22.04) repositories, followed by an 'apt update'. This may have helped, but this wasn't clear.

I got to a stage where 'apt upgrade' was "holding back" about 30 packages - I don't know why. I used 'apt install' to install these in small groups or sometimes singly. Attempting to install them all together caused obscure errors.

Edit configuration files

The following configuration files under /etc had 'dpkg-dist' files created - i.e. new versions of the files:

• default/opendkim
  No longer used - '/etc/opendkim.conf' is used instead. I had already added my 'default/opendkim' changes to '/etc/opendkim.conf' as well.
• default/bind9
• spamassassin/local.cf
• opendkim.conf
• crontab
• ssh/ssh_config
• pulse/default.pa
  I have no record of having modified this file, so simply accepted the new one.
• updatedb.conf
• systemd/journald.conf
• systemd/resolved.conf

Unless noted above, I created a new version of each of these files, merging my changes with the 'dpkg-dist' file.

Re-enable repositories