[SOLVED]Upgrade to Jessie won't run apt-get dist-upgrade

[guy13]

Hi all,
I'm trying to upgrade Wheezy to Jessie today (after succesfully going from Squeeze to Wheezy yesterday) but I've hit an annoying obstacle. I've been a good boy and followed the official Debian guidelines: backing up stuff, preparing, running apt-get update, apt-get upgrade ... all without a hitch but when I tried to run apt-get dist-upgrade I got the following result:

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root@guynux2:~# apt-get dist-upgrade
Pakketlijsten worden ingelezen... Klaar
Boom van vereisten wordt opgebouwd       
De status informatie wordt gelezen... Klaar
Opwaardering wordt doorgerekend... Mislukt
De volgende pakketten hebben niet-voldane vereisten:
 libnss-mdns : Breekt: lib32nss-mdns (< 0.10-6) maar 0.10-3.2 zal geïnstalleerd worden
E: Fout, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve maakte scheidingen aan, dit kan veroorzaakt worden door vastgehouden pakketten.

I'm pretty sure that the above is a somewhat quirky translation of the following lines:

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Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Correcting dependencies... failed.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:

E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.

The line I left blank in the English translation refers to unmet dependencies. I found suggestions here and there that the solution would be to remove/uninstall the guilty package, proceed with the upgrade and later reinstall. An alternative suggestion is to run apt-get -f dist-upgrade untill the problem solves itself. Somehow neither suggestion sounds very inviting.

Can anyone point me toward the solution of this problem? Thanks in advance.

[kiyop]

Did you indeed obey the release notes? Especially https://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/ ... tem-status ?

If you dare to try fixing ...
If I were you, I would dare to try

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apt-get update
apt-get purge lib32nss-mdns
apt-get -f dist-upgrade

But, you should check /etc/apt/sources.list , /etc/apt/sources.list.d/* , /etc/apt/preferences , /etc/apt/preferences.d/*

[fireExit]

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2 ... 00006.html
you need multiarch to complete that transition
https://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/HOWTO

[kiyop]

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2 ... 00006.html
you need multiarch to complete that transition
https://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/HOWTO

Thank you
I see.
https://packages.debian.org/jessie/lib32nss-mdns

This transitional package exists to upgrade amd64 systems from lib32nss-mdns:amd64 to libnss-mdns:i386. Because direct cross-architecture dependencies are not yet supported, it depends on an intermediate package, libnss-mdns-i386, which is only available on i386.

[guy13]

Pretty sure I followed the rules.
Running dpkg --get-selections | grep 'hold$' gives no results and running dpkg --get-selections "*" shows both libnss-mdns and lib32nss-mdns as marked for install.

[kiyop]

Have you enabled multiarch?

[guy13]

Thanks for the help. Just enabled multiarch and tried apt-get dist-upgrade again and now the machine is happily downloading a multitude of files: 17% ready, 83% to go. Gonna close this browser now to be on the safe side. (Fingers crossed.)

[guy13]

Enabling multiarch allowed dist-upgrade to work. However I ended up not being able to boot into a graphical environment. Will submit new post as this is a totally different problem (I think).

[sgosnell]

It's late now, but for future reference, it's quicker, easier, and much more reliable to do a complete new install than to try to upgrade multiple versions. You might still have to do that, but perhaps not.

Failure to boot to the DE can be caused by multiple problems, and it's hard to tell which is causing your failure. Possibly a video driver, but maybe not. A bad line in /etc/fstab can prevent booting, as well as other things.

[guy13]

@sgosnell: Thanks for your reply: I may indeed have to consider doing a fresh install after all. In the mean time I've submitted a new post with a more elaborate description of the DE problem:
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=127910
(Just in case someone knows of a solution for this... )

[guy13]

@sgosnell: Finally threw in the towel yesterday, took your advice and reinstalled from downloaded iso.