8.04 update manager stopped working when 9.04 released

Almost forgot....

When I tell Update Manager to go ahead and do the partial upgrade I get

Could not calculate the upgrade

A unresolvable problem occurred while calculating the upgrade

This can be caused by:
* Upgrading to a pre-release version of Ubuntu
* Running the current pre-release version of Ubuntu
* Unofficial software packages not provided by Ubuntu

This is most likely a transient problem, please try again later.

Try doing the updates through synaptic. Open up 'Synaptic Package Manager' from System > Administration , then click on 'Mark all Upgrades' and click 'Apply'. If that doesn't work try go to 'Edit > Fix Broken Packages'

Unfortunately my opportunity to reboot came about because I had to go out of town for a few days. Is there any way to accomplish this from a command line? I can remotely log in, but I don't have a display I can push windows to. If not, I'll try it when I return at the end of the week.

You can do this over ssh I believe. You can try the following:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -f install
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

I don't want to do a dist-upgrade. I don't intend to do that until 2011.

I don't like the idea of using the 'force' option unless I understand the reason for the failure to install without it. Unfortunately, apt-get isn't very forthcoming about such details. All it will tell me is "The following packages have been kept back:", without telling me why.

My apologies. I should have explained a bit more.

-f does not mean force. Per the manpage for apt-get:

       -f, --fix-broken
           Fix; attempt to correct a system with broken dependencies in place.
           This option, when used with install/remove, can omit any packages
           to permit APT to deduce a likely solution. Any Package that are
           specified must completely correct the problem. The option is
           sometimes necessary when running APT for the first time; APT itself
           does not allow broken package dependencies to exist on a system. It
           is possible that a system´s dependency structure can be so corrupt
           as to require manual intervention (which usually means using
           dselect(8) or dpkg --remove to eliminate some of the offending
           packages). Use of this option together with -m may produce an error
           in some situations. Configuration Item: APT::Get::Fix-Broken.

Also, apt-get dist-upgrade is not the same as do-release-upgrade. dist-upgrade will only have the effect of upgrading you to a new distribution if your /etc/apt/sources.list is set up to use the 9.04 repos. If your sources.list file is set up to use 8.04, dist-upgrade just deals with situations in which an upgrading package has new dependencies that need to be resolved. From the man page:

     dist-upgrade
           dist-upgrade in addition to performing the function of upgrade,
           also intelligently handles changing dependencies with new versions
           of packages; apt-get has a "smart" conflict resolution system, and
           it will attempt to upgrade the most important packages at the
           expense of less important ones if necessary. So, dist-upgrade
           command may remove some packages. The /etc/apt/sources.list file
           contains a list of locations from which to retrieve desired package
           files. See also apt_preferences(5) for a mechanism for overriding
           the general settings for individual packages.

Also, the apt-get dist-upgrade will tell you exactly what is going to change and ask you to confirm it before you proceed so you would be able to approve any changes that occur.

Doh! You're right, thanks. I had mentally translated the --force-yes to -f, even though I had already earlier used the -f option to see if it would fix anything.

If there are dependency issues that require the dist-upgrade it would be nice if it would tell you. One would expect that the dependencies should be handled automatically, unless there's a conflict. In which case it should report the conflict.

I don't understand why the kernel update is being kept back.

Thanks.