Upgrade apparently stalled out

[Michael F. Stemper]

Yesterday afternoon, I finally broke down and pushed the "Upgrade" button
on one of my boxes, to move it from 18.04 to 20.04.

Everything started off just fine. After an hour or so, I had a little window
with a task checklist. It spent an hour or so half-way through "Calculating
changes" (text from memory).

I went and did other things. A couple of hours later, I checked on it, and
this checklist was gone. In its place was what looked like a large xterm,
roughly 800x600 pixels by eyeballing it.

No text in it, no cursor, no title bar, no chrome of any kind. I can move
it around, but that's rather pointless.

The box is still happily running cronjobs and responding to sftp and ssh
requests.

What do I need to do to either push the upgrade to completion or to undo it?
It seems to be in a rather precarious situation at the moment.

[Paul]

Post by Michael F. Stemper
Yesterday afternoon, I finally broke down and pushed the "Upgrade" button
on one of my boxes, to move it from 18.04 to 20.04.
Everything started off just fine. After an hour or so, I had a little window
with a task checklist. It spent an hour or so half-way through "Calculating
changes" (text from memory).
I went and did other things. A couple of hours later, I checked on it, and
this checklist was gone. In its place was what looked like a large xterm,
roughly 800x600 pixels by eyeballing it.
No text in it, no cursor, no title bar, no chrome of any kind. I can move
it around, but that's rather pointless.
The box is still happily running cronjobs and responding to sftp and ssh
requests.
What do I need to do to either push the upgrade to completion or to undo it?
It seems to be in a rather precarious situation at the moment.

The stalling part happened to me as well. 23.10 to 24.04 .

The weird interface (Xterm with an animation box below it), showed
the installer was removing Thunderbird .deb and replacing it with
Thunderbird snap instead. And the screen progress halted, disk
LED stopped flashing.

I tried to repair it, the broken packages thing and so on.

I would say after half an hour, I restored from backup.

This is my backup sequence, not that it matters.

Disk#34 full backup
Clone Disk#29 to Disk #34 (same BLKIDs etc, can't run the two disks at once, no, NOT dd)
Run 24.04 Upgrade on Disk #34 (fail, kaboom, no forward progress, stuck)

Clone Ubu23.10 from Disk#29 to Disk#34.
Boot 23.10 and remove Thunderbird .deb
Run 24.04 Upgrade, finished this time. Reboot to discover 640x480 screen res, no option to change.
Fiddle with drivers, manage to fix it. Back to native screen resolution.

Blow away trial upgrade, restore Disk#34 from backup.
Try a Ubuntu 24.04 Clean install to the end of Disk#34,
add to the Linux Mint which is already on Disk#34.
Screen resolution native, functional.

But the new installer (as Upgrade), I don't know what's up with that. Summer Intern ?
High school is out ?

One of the problems with "releasing operating systems on a schedule",
is you have two choices. Be perpetually late, but deliver great product.
Or, what was the other option again ?

Paul