20.04.4 to 22.04.1 upgrade: dovecot-core, libdvd-pkg, VirtualBox, amdgpu

[Andrew J. Caines]

Liam,

Thanks for taking the time to read and respond to my post with some good
questions and observations.

>> It has LVM,
> Uhoh.
>
>> LUKS encryption,
> Double uhoh.

If one day the wrong bit flips and I can't decrypt /, it's going to be a
pain, but no critical data will have been lost. I shall summon Murphy by
saying that it hasn't happened in the six or so years since the initial
install. As for LVM and LUKS, both are mature and stable.

> Btrfs *and* ext4? Why? Which is on which?

ext4 on / from what was (and still is) the Ubuntu default on install,
btrfs for a couple of data volumes.

> What packages?

Listing all 2064 installed packages would be excessive and saying
"Ubuntu packages" would be unhelpful. What would be a useful answer?


>> Snaps and Flatpaks and runs some network application services.
> *Gulp*

Don't worry, they are not critical infrastructure services, just local
mail management... or were you gulping at Snaps and/or Flatpaks?

> How much free space did you have before you started?

Plenty in / and I don't mind clearing out /boot when needed.

> How did you check?

I didn't bother. The storage on this host is plentiful outside /boot.

> After `dpkg-reconfigure -a` the normal next step is
> sudo apt-install -f

The "dpkg --configure -a" (which I think you mean since dpkg-reconfigure
has no "-a") was automatically run.
I think you meant "apt install -f" - effectively "apt-get install -f" -
to fix broken package dependencies, however in this case there did not
appear to be any package dependency problems. On the other hand, it
should not hurt to run it just to check.

>> I tried a three-way merge, which failed, ...
> Ouch.

No hassle for me with a familiar config, but offering a three-way merge
which doesn't work seems bad in many ways.

>> $ uname -r
>> 5.4.0-124-generic
> Hang on. You weren't on the HWE stack already? Any particular reason why not?

No need, as the hardware can't be described as new. A couple of the
spinning disks have been powered on for 11 years, 8 months and 18 days
and the BIOS release date is carved in roman numerals.

> 5.4 is the wrong kernel for 22.04. It uses 5.15. You still have the
> original 20.04 kernel.

That was before the reboot, hence the kernel for 20.04.

>> I re-ran Update Manager.
> Wrong tool. `apt install -f` is needed to try to clean up the package
> database. You should have done this before proceeding.

You're not wrong, but I ran Update Manager to let it take care of any
checks and give me either errors or a picture of the status of the
packages, which it did.

> I'm surprised anything else worked TBH, unless you did it and didn't
> mention it?

While terse, I did not intentionally omit any detail. The email was
based on my notes of observations made during the process, so omissions
and errors are more than possible.

> You know, VirtualBox is in the repos and you don't really need an
> external version unless there's something in it you require.

Quite right. In 22.04 the Ubuntu package virtualbox is based on the 6.1
release, however it will likely not track new (major) releases during
the long LTS lifecycle - as was the case with the previous LTS releases
- and hence my preference for the vendor repo.

> The KISS principle always applies.

As Albert Einstein wrote, "Make things as simple as possible, but no
simpler." and he was fairly smart, however not only am I not smart
enough to know the optimal simplicity for all cases, but I like to
optimise things until I need to fix them.

>> Trying to install the latest AMDGPU driver... I'm sure I missed something
>> for doing this the easy and right way.
> This is a bit worrying...

No need to worry as long as no-one else follows my example and does it
what appears to be the wrong way without realising the consequences.

While things have been painfully slowly improving, anyone who tries to
deal with proprietary drivers discovers the quality chasm^Wgap between
them - like most COTS software - and most free software. What I did was
consistent withe AMD's instructions right up to the point it didn't
work. I know how to work around it and the consequences of doing so.

>> While the same may apply to Snaps and Flatpaks, I did not change the
>> three Snap applications in ~/snap/ or any Flatpaks...
> When you update, do you update those systems to?

Not sure I understand your question. Since the update mechanism for
these two packaging systems are independent of the OS packages, I didn't
care if the Ubuntu upgrade did anything with them.

> Me personally, every day, I run this sequence: ...

I do something very similar on a very similar schedule across all my
hosts, appliances, devices, pets, ...

--
-Andrew J. Caines-   Unix Systems Architect   A.J.Caines at halplant.com
   "Machines take me by surprise with great frequency" - Alan Turing