Another ubuntu update adventure
Ubuntu 20.04 soon will be unsupported outside ESM so i thought, ill just upgrade that
one box quickly theres little special on it, it should go smoothly. This box is not
critical either. It all looked good until snap was updated.
That simply errored out, apparently it wanted to connect to the network in the middle
of the upgrade (not ok).
But why did the network connection fail ?
ubuntu upgraded unbound, fucked the config up and while i had seen the note about it,
i thought yeah ill fix it later if it breaks. But whatever, i fix that one include line
in the config and restart unbound and that fixes it.
And then we restart do-release-upgrade, but that refuses to continue.
So we just run apt-get dist-upgrade and that happily finishes with no issues.
We confirm that everything points to the new distro version and no broken packages remain
all good, ohh boy i was wrong
After a reboot the system had lost its graphical desktop environment.
But who cares, ill just do a “apt-get install ubuntu-desktop-minimal” thats gonna fix it
But something was wrong, the list of packages we where missing was really long, this system had a fully
working desktop environment before the upgrade. Anyway i ok-ed the list and expected it would
all be fine in a few minutes. But no, apt couldnt actually install anything, it had no network
access. So i though yeah right lets restart unbound, but no unbound refused to start there was
no network interface. ubuntu had nicely uninstalled all parts of NetworkManager during the “upgrade”
without replacement.
Back to basics, i setup the network old style through /etc/network/interfaces
then installed ubuntu-desktop-minimal which also pulled in NetworkManager
and everything looked good, i rebooted and i was greeted with a blurry GUI luuking
like iam 20 years in the past. Changing resolution, no, thats not it.
the internet hinted to “ubuntu-drivers install” which again failed with no network
so i redid /etc/network/interfaces and retried which without asking installed a bunch of
random drivers (not ok, ubuntu), a reboot later teh GUI looked normal.
And the network again still did not work. The network manager applet wasnt running, the
network did not show up in any GUI, the nmcli said unmanaged. i undid all my stuff from
/etc/interfaces, rebooted and restarted stuff but i couldnt figure out what the correct
way is that ubuntu uses to make this work. The internet also was not revealing about
this, everyone was just hacking around it when they hit this. Theres a config file in
/usr/lib/NetworkManager/conf.d/10-globally-managed-devices.conf
which disabled all ethernet interfaces. And the only way i could make that work was
to override it in /etc/NetworkManager/, then it works but obviously thats not how
ubuntu does it, so thats slightly strange but it works and its just one line so
it seemed not justified to investigate that further.
Anyway, ubuntu reminded me why i hate upgrading these boxes.
Btw, why did this likely happen ? likely i uninstalled some spyware from ubuntu and
ubuntu-desktop-minimal dependent on that which caused ubuntu-desktop-minimal to be
removed with the spyware. And when you upgrade without the ubuntu-desktop-minimal
metapackage then ubuntu messes up upgrading a desktop. But thats just a hypothesis
Update 2025-03-17: Updated that box from 22.04 to 24.04 and surprisingly no problems