On 7/1/24 9:34 PM, gmcaplan--- via WLUG wrote:
John, Thank you for your help with my recent Linux problems. Sorry I did not say anything sooner.
I'm coming late to this discussion; sorry about that. Re: "old packages from a previous upgrade" ... in Ubuntu, the "do-release-upgrade" script is supposed to clear those out. But if do-release-upgrade crashes out, people can get lost as they don't know how to duke it out with the package manager. My standard "update the software" in Ubuntu/Debian looks for deletable and orphan packages specifically. Nuking orphan stuff and removing old cruft beforehand, is THE WAY to make your upgrades work better. The only other source of complication is old additional software repos in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/[...] which are NOT supported in the OS release you're upgrading INTO. Does your package manager want you to delete stuff? dpkg -l | grep '^r' | awk '{print $2}' | sort | fmt ... this command should return no output if your system is clean. Does your machine harbor software not attached to any software repo? (these are AKA "Obsolete packages") Learn the shocking truth: aptitude show '~o' | grep Package | awk '{print $2}' | sort | fmt ... this command should also produce no output on a happy machine, other than perhaps one-shot .deb files installed from downloads (i.e., if you download the zoom client by hand and install that without using a repo, etc). The more cruft, the worse your major-version-upgrade experience will be. The upgrade is performed entirely by the package manager, so that part of your OS needs to be happy before you can start an upgrade with confidence. --MCV.