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I realize I am late to the game of upgrading my desktop machine LTS from 16.04 to 18.04. I did made a backup of my home directory using the backup utility and also copied some system directories to an external drive.

I completed all updates to 16.04 and then started the upgrade process using the automated method that repeatedly informed me 18.04 was available. After reading more about this, I realized I may have been better off using the command line.

I did get a number of messages indicating diffs in certain conf files and chose to replace most, if not all, of these rather than keeping them. There seems to be an issue with systemd-shim, which I cannot seem to remove or update. I did read the bug list on that issue, but the current state of system won't allow me to run those commands.

I suspect there are some 3rd party packages that might be contributing to my issues, but I do not know how to access that info at this stage. I do not think this is a video issue and I do not have an Nvidea card.

Regardless, the upgrade completed to a point, but not fully. I cannot restart into the system except for recovery mode. In recovery mode, I do enable networking, but upon going to clean-up, find space, or root, it appears domain names cannot resolve and therefore fail on apt-updates, etc.

I do have 18.04 on a DVD and can see and access the hard drive, so perhaps I might be able to execute something from there or from recovery mode.

I have tried a number of "solutions" but somewhat haphazardly. I would like to retain as much of my previous setup as possible, but will do whatever it takes.

I wish I could provide a boot list of where the process hangs, but at some point the screen goes blank. Perhaps there is a way to get this info?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

rhuppert
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  • Welcome to AskUbuntu, when I got too many problems via do-release-upgrade command, use an alternative way, backup package list and repos then clean install new OS. https://askubuntu.com/questions/9135/how-to-backup-settings-and-list-of-installed-packages, it's safer making Package.list helps me a lot. Note: the package list can't be applied on the different version of OS exactly. You can do the batch and think where it's stopped. – Sadaharu Wakisaka Mar 19 '20 at 01:18
  • Sadaharu, thanks for your input. I will be using your method in the future. In the meantime I will detail the solution to my ordeal below. – rhuppert Mar 21 '20 at 17:27

1 Answers1

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There were several issues that contributed to my problem.

In recovery mode, I realized I had internet connectivity, but DNS was not resolving. DNS not working in recovery mode

echo "nameserver 8.8.8.8" >/etc/resolv.conf

Next, fixing the systemd-shim error message issue was resolved here: remove systemd-shim reference I made sure I could run the find space and fix broken packages options in recovery mode.

sudo mv /usr/share/dbus-1/system-services/org.freedesktop.systemd1.service /usr/share/dbus-1/system-services/org.freedesktop.systemd1.service.bak

Next, even though I am running on an HP box with an integrated Intel card, I suspect I may have used my Geforce card at one time, so I purged Nvidia drivers, even though I thought it would be futile. purge nvidia drivers

sudo apt-get remove --purge '^nvidia-.*'

Finally, I was able get to a login page (GDM3) and it did not respond to my password. I fixed this after realizing my Home directory was somehow changed to root.

Hope this helps someone, although I am late to the Bionic game.

rhuppert
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