On Sat, 2 Oct 2021 11:57:51 -0400 "Roy J. Tellason, Sr." <[email protected]> wrote:
> In recent messaging here I touched on how I'd determined that my > workstation was way behind being current. Apparently I needed to go > 8->9->10->11. I tried the first of those steps, and things did not > go well in a number of ways... First, back up all your data before starting the dist-upgrade series. Also, read and follow the Release Notes of dist-upgrade for each version. Reboot after each version upgrade, then do an apt-get update/upgrade, etc. > For some reason, the software decided to remove virtualbox. Which > is a real problem, because it's inside a virtual machine that I do > all of my mail, so I couldn't get at my mail for a while. In > Synaptic Package Manager if I try to install it I get the following > error message: > > "Package virtualbox has no available version, but exists in the > database. This typically means that the package was mentioned in a > dependency and never uploaded, has been obsoleted or is not > available with the contents of sources.list" > > I got temporarily past this by installing 8 on this laptop I'm > currently typimg on. Some things are decidedly less convenient. Complete the dist-upgrade for all versions, then reinstall VirtualBox. Be sure you saved all your VMs before the dist-upgrade(s). They may be deleted. I don't use the VB version in the Debian repos, but download and install the .deb directly from their web site. During the install the VB repo will be set up. > Firefox is majorly different, apparently having gone from 68.9.0 --> > 78.14.0esr. It no longer uses the font that I'm telling it to, and > for some odd reason won't play any youtube videos any more. Instead > I see a message on the screen that says "if video doesn't start > momentarily restart your device". Huh? > > Konqueror is also broken, I get "Could not start proess Unable to > create io-slave: klauncher said: Error loading 'kio_file'"... > > Trying to open a file with Okular gets me a similar message. Complete the entire dist-upgrade before trying to fix problems. The problems may fix themselves. > I don't see any way to back out of these changes, or any obvious > place to look for where the problems are. Suggestions welcomed. I avoid dist-upgrading, if I can because of such problems, and do a clean install of the newest version on a free partition keeping the old install as fallback in case something goes awry. B
