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I have been aware of the new releases of Ubuntu for some time, but never felt a need to upgrade from 14.04 until today when I wanted to try the latest KDEnlive release but couldn't get it to update and it seemed there was not a binary available for 14.04 - only 15.10 or 16.04... so time to upgrade Ubuntu, I thought...

So long story short, I did a bunch of reading and it seemed it should be easy to upgrade using the software updater. Should be automatic even? Just select "Notify me of new Ubuntu Release".... Not so easy. I have had these repository errors for months and it seems they prevent the upgrade. So I ended up removing all the third-party PPAs from my list. Still couldn't get the updater to automatically give me the option to upgrade.

So more reading I found the command: sudo do-release-upgrade

Which I typed into the terminal and it told me it would take 1 hour and 34 minutes. Five hours later (including several pauses when I had to give it input for mySQL and Apache and I was AFK)... and I was staring at a blank screen.

I obviously wasn't watching the whole upgrade process. I checked in on it every hour or so - that's how I knew I needed to click OK for mySQL a couple times and something for Apache. So I don't know what it was doing before the screen went blank. But the computer was still powered on. The monitor was on and seemed to have a signal (no warning about missing signal). I thought maybe something to do with the nvidia drivers being upgraded and so I waited another hour... still a blank screen. No indication that anything was happening. Hard Drive silent.

I tried moving the mouse around, hitting ESC, Alt-F4, Ctrl-Break. Nothing. Ultimately I did a hard power off on the computer and restarted it.

It boots up. To a console login for Ubuntu 15.10. Not what I was expecting. I used to have a GUI login screen. But fine...

Anyway, I can login. And type startx... but I don't have a launcher, no start button, no nothing. Just the desktop with my couple of shortcuts on it.

Also no WiFi enabled.

Basically the upgrade has ruined everything... how do I save this?

MadMike
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Mark
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1 Answers1

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First things first: before you proceed with the following procedure you should make sure to backup your data, just in case. You can do this from the TTY.

After thats out of the way lets try to rescue your system (in very worst case you might need to do a clean new install hence the backup). Start with checking your /etc/apt/sources.list if all links are consistent for wily.

If not lets replace that with a new sources.list file. To do that enter sudo su into the TTY console and then do the following lines one by one:

wget -O- http://pastebin.com/raw/T544dTJE > /etc/apt/sources.list

That will replace your sources list without you needing something to copy and paste. The next steps are doing an update to renew the cache.

apt-get update

Then you now can try to repair maybe broken packages before continuing.

apt-get -f install
dpkg --configure -a

Now make an dist-upgrade to get all installed packages as far up to date as possible.

apt-get dist-upgrade

After that you have to maybe reinstall the desktop environment. Do so with:

apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

This will hopefully fix it far enough that you can either stay at 15.10 or proceed upgrading to 16.04, thats up to you. Finally reboot and hope that it worked out. Sadly I can't give you a guarantee that it will work, but at least it is worth a shot.

Videonauth
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  • I didn't get very far into this before realizing that the non-working wifi was a problem. So I found a 50-ft network cable and ran it across the apartment... but still no internet access. I think that is going to be the first thing that needs to be fixed. – Mark Jun 04 '16 at 14:41
  • Phew, that really is an issue on its own, have you tried to scour AskUbuntu for answers for this? However IMO the most hassle free way of solving this would be to backup your data and start over fresh installing. Sad to say this because i know its not a very convenient answer at all. – Videonauth Jun 04 '16 at 23:08
  • Yeah, that seems like the way to go at this point. Just copy my home directory onto an external drive... IF I can get the external drive to talk to the machine... – Mark Jun 05 '16 at 14:49