2010-02-11

Ubuntu/Lucid: recovering from yesterday's messy update

Yesterday a silly oversight in the packaging of udev in Ubuntu/Lucid produced a breakage that consistently makes dpkg barf. Here's a simple command line recipe to recover from it. In your terminal application, type:

sudo sed -i 's#copy_exec /lib/udev/firmware.sh#copy_exec /lib/udev/firmware#' /usr/share/initramfs-tools/hooks/udev && sudo dpkg -a --configure && sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude safe-upgrade

...then press enter. You should be able to resume normal operation right after.

PS: as suggested by others, I revised the above snippet to use sed locally, since not everyone has patch installed.

8 comments:

martin said...

What is the LP bug number for this issue?

Martin-Éric said...

There were several duplicates. 520021 is one of them.

The issue was fixed in udev 151-2 without the proper LP bug number being mentioned.

Realo! said...

if you don't have "patch" already installed there seems to be no fix for this problem. I cannot install "patch" because I then get the same error when I run apt-get

update-initramfs: failed for /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-12-generic

Martin-Éric said...

A, you'll get credit the day when you 1) stop posting as an anonymous coward and 2) stop being so full of yourself.

Unknown said...

Great response to yet another censorship round of deleting valid comments and calling other names. Way to go for someone who has signed the Ubuntu CoC ("Be respectful").

This is far from anonymous btw., your blog doesn't allow anonymous comments in any sense.

Martin-Éric said...

...said Mr.A, whose identity is obfuscated and profile non-accessible.

Actually, it was you who behaved in an unfriendly manner, right from the get-go when you commented my blog, and THEN you expect friendly behavior? How about you look at yourself in the mirror?

Unknown said...

See, I just pointed out right from the start that telling people to wget some URL and let it sudo patch something that isn't visible is a pretty bad advice, especially with respect to getting people to grasp some security sensitivity behavior.

Not sure what itches you so much about pointing out that this isn't really a suggestion that should be made in blogs that are syndicated on various planets. But it's fine, calling other names is really the way to react to having that pointed out in a meant helpful way, and censoring just fits the pattern. Likewise with assuming that everyone on the net is male.

Martin-Éric said...

A, sorry, but there wasn't anything friendly about the tone of your initial comment. And no, I didn't assume that you were male, female or transsexual.