10 October 2014

595. Issue upgrading debian jessie -- stuck at systemd

Doing a dist-upgrade yesterday (9th of October 2014) it failed because of issues with configuring systemd. In the end my troubleshooting didn't help, but google did.

Dead-end troubleshooting:

Trying to work through it:
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these. The following packages have unmet dependencies: systemd-sysv : Depends: systemd (= 208-8) but 215-5+b1 is installed E: Unmet dependencies. Try using -f.
Checking why systemd-sysv is mentioning 208-8 instead of 215-5:
apt-cache policy systemd-sysv systemd-sysv: Installed: 208-8 Candidate: 215-5+b1 Version table: 215-5+b1 0 500 http://ftp.iinet.net.au/debian/debian/ testing/main amd64 Packages *** 208-8 0 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
Let's try forcing 215-5:
sudo apt-get install systemd-sysv=215-5+b1 Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done [..] The following packages will be upgraded: systemd-sysv 1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 531 not upgraded. 422 not fully installed or removed. Need to get 0 B/29.1 kB of archives. After this operation, 3,072 B of additional disk space will be used. Retrieving bug reports... Done Parsing Found/Fixed information... Done Setting up systemd (215-5+b1) ... dpkg: error processing package systemd (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1 Errors were encountered while processing: systemd E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
OK, let's try working on systemd:
sudo dpkg -D2 --configure systemd Setting up systemd (215-5+b1) ... D000002: fork/exec /var/lib/dpkg/info/systemd.postinst ( configure 208-8 ) dpkg: error processing package systemd (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1 Errors were encountered while processing: systemd

Solving it:
No luck. Google wasn't too helpful initially, until I came across https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=762275
sudo delgroup systemd-journal Removing group `systemd-journal' ... Done.
Then tried
sudo dpkg -D2 --configure systemd Setting up systemd (215-5+b1) ... D000002: fork/exec /var/lib/dpkg/info/systemd.postinst ( configure 208-8 ) /var/lib/dpkg/info/systemd.postinst: 128: /var/lib/dpkg/info/systemd.postinst: cannot open /run/systemd/was-enabled: No such file
and
sudo apt-get install -f [..] Do you want to continue? [Y/n] Y Retrieving bug reports... Done Parsing Found/Fixed information... Done (Reading database ... 462023 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack .../systemd-sysv_215-5+b1_amd64.deb ... Unpacking systemd-sysv (215-5+b1) over (208-8) ... Processing triggers for man-db (2.6.7.1-1) ... Setting up systemd-sysv (215-5+b1) ... [..]
and then
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
works again!

Many reasons to dislike systemd, although in this case I guess it's poor packaging.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks. This has been a problem for a while, and this solution works.

    ReplyDelete
  2. an other working solution.

    check if you have installed systemd systemd-sysv
    now run : update-grub

    check : cat /boot/grub/grub.cfg | grep "init="
    you need to see in the Linux line(s) : init=/lib/sysvinit/init

    reboot and check again.

    ReplyDelete