Ubuntu
xorg-server package

Broken install should provide some guidance

Bug #47705 reported by Tancred Lindholm
4
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
xorg-server (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Wishlist
Unassigned

Bug Description

In my case, the breezy->dapper upgrade ended at the command line (X was busted)
In such case, it would be useful to offer the user some guidance as to what to do next (for those who do not know how to manually continue package install).

One thing that comes to mind is temporarily replacing the login MOTD (message-of-the-day) of the install and root users to provide a brief message about which commands to type in. The original MOTD can then be automagically restored when the upgarde is done. Replacing the MOTD file should do very little additional harm, esp since the system is already assumed to be hosed at this point.

Revision history for this message
Kees Cook (kees) wrote :

Thanks for your report! Something like this is being planned as part of the "bullet-proof X" spec for feisty:
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+spec/bullet-proof-x

Revision history for this message
Tancred Lindholm (tancred-lindholm) wrote :

A bit of clarification: what happened was that the config of a package (pcmcia-cs I think) caused a hard crash + reboot. Thus, on reboot, I needed to manually invoke dpkg form the command line to finish off the install. At that point it would have been nice to have a message saying something like

"Your upgrade was unexpectedly interrupted (power failure, hardware problem, system crash). Type dpkg ... to resume"

I don't recall the exact state of the X11 packages at that point, but I think it was more of a missing/half-configured packages problem than that the actual X config files were broken. (X came up nicely after dpkg had finished.)

Revision history for this message
Bryce Harrington (bryce) wrote :

Bulletproof-X is implemented now, so I'm going to close this as fixed.

Changed in xorg-server:
status: In Progress → Fix Released
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