21.04 installation process broken

[Bret Busby]

On 24/04/2021, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 24 Apr 2021 at 21:42, Bret Busby <bret.busby at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hello.
>>
>> With a three day lockdown imposed, that started on Friday, and a
>> notification of free data from an Internet access provider, due to
>> apparent previous problems, I thought it would be an opportunity to
>> try to do clean installs of UbuntuMATE 21.04.
>>
>> The installation process had more or less, appeared to proceed okay;
>> then I rebooted, and the Welcome screen offered the invitation to add
>> more software than the default installation, so, I took up the
>> invitation.
>>
>> gnucash would not download, chromium, which is apparently, not run by
>> google, so I thought I would try it, would not install, brave would
>> not download, and I now have an error message that states that "The
>> package system is broken".
>>
>> Is 21.04 really ready to install?
>
> There is no point posting vague points about stuff failing to install
> without providing details.  This is a list for technical support but
> unless you show us the errors you encountered it is difficult to help.
>
> Do you get any errors from
> sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade
>
> Colin
>
>>
>> --
>> Bret Busby
>> Armadale
>> West Australia
>> (UTC+0800)
>> ..............
>>

The information that I gave, included the information that was
provided to me by the system.

I have overcome the problem; I had managed to install synaptic, and I
used that to change the sources - the Australian suppositories that
were automatically allocated, appeared to be not ready, and not
complete. So, I used the option to find the best available sources.
Whilst the source server selected, was not as fast as I had found the
ubuntu.com mirrors to be, in the past (up to about 8MB/s), the
software installation was able to complete.

One suggestion that I have - I do not know whether the Software
Boutique is from the MATE people, or from Canonical, but, I think it
would be useful, with packages offered for installation, to include,
in the brief description, the download size expected for the package.
I thought it would be interesting, to have a look at flightgear, but,
its database was about 1.4GB, and, all up, I think that flightgear
took about 2GB of download, with its associated packages, and, about
an hour or so, and was almost as big as the default complete operating
system download (2.8GB) - If I had known the size of the download
involved for flightgear, whilst the product may be good, I would not
have downloaded and installed it, due to the download size, as the
downloading and installing of it, was only for curiosity, rather than
need or expected regular usage.

Also, with synaptic, logging in once, as superuser, enables all
downloads and installations to be completed during the synaptic
session, but, for the Software Boutique, I had to log in again as
superuser, after every two packages were downloaded and installed, to
continue , so, with about 30 or so packages being selected, it became
annoying, and, I could not leave the computer to complete the task.

The total downloads, for the whole of the 21.04 installation, show as 5.0GB.

-- 
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
(UTC+0800)
..............