Not too many sharks

[liv]

So what happened is that I semi-broke my Ubuntu install, and I tried to fix it without too much crying at my more technically competent partners. In process I expanded my knowledge and confidence, but ended up not being completely able to fix it on my own.

My laptop running Ubuntu 22.04 prompted me for an automatic update. I clicked ok. It then gave me an error message that some packages were missing [(?) I did not log this so I'm reconstructing from memory] and that I should type the command apt-get upgrade at the terminal. I did so without really thinking it through; I assumed if the OS told me to type a command it would be ok. cjwatson when he was untangling the mess I ended up in said that this was a bad choice, not really by me because I had no way to know any better, but by the OS, because apt-get can only install packages that don't have dependencies and my running this command left things in an awkward unfinished state. My experience was that it appeared to work, it gave me some messages about installing things and returned me to the command prompt. Fine.

However, a couple of days later I wanted to play a game that said it was only compatible with Windows. So I booted into Windows, played my game, and then when I tried to get back to Ubuntu it gave me a horrible screen of death: mostly a blank white screen, with a tiny, blurry graphic not matching any branding, showing a picture of an old-fashioned monitor with a sadface and the error message Oh no! Something has gone wrong. Please log out and try again. There was no way to interact with this screen – it wasn't accepting mouse input – except by pressing Enter, which just looped back to the same screen. Power cycling also looped back to the same screen. The completely meaningless error message with a sadface made me assume it was a Windows problem, so it took me a few tries to even think of including Ubuntu in my search. The good thing about living in the future is that I could use my phone to look for advice even though my computer was unreachable!

Searching on the error message with Ubuntu gave me this StackExchange question. It isn't the exact error message I saw but it does mention dual boot with Windows. The person who had the problem didn't really get it fixed, but one of the answers had a link to a video about the 'Oh no! something has gone wrong' error. It can't really be the case that this random YouTube by a random person is the only place where the error is documented, but it's such a generic damn error message that I wasn't able to find anything else. Anyway I'm putting it here partly so that if anyone else sees this error message, it's at least documented in text instead of just an expletive video.

So. I painstakingly watch the video and it is really helpful and well explained, but would have been a lot easier in plain text. (I mean, pausing a video, on your phone, and trying to copy-type a command from the still of the video of the terminal, is not a sensible way to proceed.) At about 1'07'' the video says you can reach a terminal from the screen of death by pressing ctrl + fn + alt + F3. I am broadly quite pissed off about this, wtf kind of Konami code is this? And why is the only way to find out about it in a video and not in any kind of official Ubuntu materials? I assume it is documented somewhere but even when I knew about it I found it really hard to search for; maybe it's just one of those things that anyone familiar with Linux would automatically know, but I can't imagine how I was supposed to guess that that particular combination of 4 keys would bring up a terminal from a screen of death that otherwise seemed not to accept any input.

Apparently (2'37'' on the video) this particular terminal is called the tty console. It asked for a login, and I wasn't sure I was going to be able to get past that, but I vaguely remembered that I had set rachel as a username and the password was the same as the one I use to log in normally on a normal boot. Following the video (3'51'') I tried the command sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade. I had the same problem as the YouTuber, AF Tech: it wanted me to configure dpkg. So I try AF Tech's command (3'59''): dpkg --configure -a which initially asked for an admin login, and then with sudo simply returned me to the command line without any apparent effect. AF Tech reports that everything went fine from there but sadly this was not my experience. I tried apt dist-upgrade again and this resolved the error about dpkg but instead gave me a new error: pkgProblemResolver::ResolveByKeep is looping on package nautilus:amd64. AF Tech does say very fast at 4'25'' and then it told me that some package was looping so I just ran sudo apt --fix-broken install. I tried that but still had the same error.

At this point, one of the things I was finding most difficult is that I wasn't able to scroll up within the terminal, so every time I ran a command the messages just scrolled off the screen. I was trying to take notes on what I was doing on a piece of paper (which is how I'm able to write this up now). In hindsight I think the secret code for that is ctrl + shift + up, and also it is probably possible to find internal logs from all these terminals. But I didn't know that so I was working with a phone and a piece of paper. I also took a break at this point as I needed to catch a train to travel to a community where I was working at the weekend. I texted my lovely cjwatson and asked him to reassure me that I probably hadn't irreversibly bricked the computer (and that he would still love me even if I am very much lacking in computer skills). So I went away feeling a bit nervous but at least somewhat optimistic that I would be able to dig myself out of the hole.

When I got back I searched on the error message about 'looping on package' and found another StackExchange article which told me that the same error with a different package name could be fixed with apt install and the package name. However, I did not stop to check what nautilus:amd64 actually is, and I did not at this point understand the limitations of apt. It turns out that Nautilus is fairly fundamental to Ubuntu actually having a GUI and desktop, so it wasn't just some random missing package, and using apt install on it was a foolish idea. It also turned out that this install process was absolutely huge, screens and screens of messages. It would hang for a bit and then resume, but at one point it got stuck for over 2 hours. The most recent output at the point was [644.122808] iwlwifi 0000:00:14:3:LMAC1 CURRENT PC:0xd0 (I have no idea if that is meaningful or not but I wrote it down once I realized it was permanently stuck there). I didn't want to force reboot in the middle of that in case I made something worse, but it was clearly not progressing. I searched for how to get out of a terminal that was hung in that way, and found a suggestion of ctrl + c. That didn't work, neither did ctrl + alt + delete (which is Windowsy but works on Ubuntu in the normal desktop context). I did eventually decide to just power cycle because I had no real alternative.

This did in fact go kind of badly. I texted jack that I thought the sharks were after me. Because at this point it did not even give me the screen with the list of boot options, which I now know is called grub. It just went straight into the tty terminal. It was labelled as Ubuntu 24.04.2 which should have raised my suspicions, as up to that point I had been on 22.04. Since I didn't have any better ideas and was a bit scared that I'd lost Windows as well, I tried apt upgrade again. That gave me lots and lots of messages which I didn't capture (though I think the computer did internally), seemed to be about 'unpacking' and 'setting up' many things. Once it went back to the terminal prompt I restarted, and that did get me grub 2.12 back. However, when I selected Ubuntu it didn't boot into my desktop, but back to tty1.

I described the problem to cjwatson, explaining that I was pretty sure I had some kind of OS under there but no desktop, and he suggested apt install ubuntu-desktop. That got me a usable computer back. Now obviously cjwatson has 30 years of experience (including at one point actually working on the bootloader for Ubuntu) so it's not in fact black magic that he was able to diagnose and fix my problem with a single command based on my extremely vague description. The computer was working, yay! But everything looked weird and different, boo! At this point I realized that I had in fact, fairly unintentionally, upgraded from Ubuntu 22.02 Jammy Jellyfish to 24.02 Noble Numbat. This is a normal English meaning of the word 'upgrade', and the helpful person in the YouTube video was trying to do this very thing when the problem described in the tutorial showed up.

cjwatson kindly offered to look at my computer when we were next in the same place, and he was able to run the command less /var/log/apt/history.log to reconstruct most of what I'd done. It turned out that I had left the poor machine in a mixed state that was partly 22.04 and partly 24.04, which is a bad idea. I think that happened all the way back when I obeyed its suggestion to run apt-get upgrade, but possibly it happened when I tried to follow the instructions in the video. Also, he explained that it was unlikely to be Windows' fault directly as Windows can't cross the boot partition, but that some of the broken updates had only been applied when I did a full restart to boot into Windows. He saw that the apt commands had deleted some stuff that needed to be there, and he fixed that by going through carefully and manually replacing the missing packages. My somewhat vague understanding is that apt is fairly general and will guess what is likely to be most useful, but dpkg lets you select individual packages manually that you do or don't want. But if you are a fairly clueless newbie like me you're not really going to know what packages are important.

That left me with a small problem which I'm very proud of solving without needing to beg for much help from my poor long-suffering partners. At first I thought the sound wasn't working. It turned out to be a bit more subtle than that; the computer could see and communicate with external speakers and microphones, but it was failing to actually send any sound to the external speaker specifically from Zoom (and certain Steam games). Given that Zoom calls and games are the main reasons I need sound on my computer, I hadn't initially understood that it was otherwise working. But the inbuilt sound system on my computer is really bad, it doesn't give me good enough sound quality to run a Zoom class without an external microphone. It took me a while to test also that the problem was with the computer software, not with my peripherals, since I have a Jabra conference mic at home and a set of bluetooth headphones in London and I had to convince myself they were both failing in the same way.

I did some searching around and found this Ask Ubuntu Stack Exchange. This isn't the exact same problem I had, I was getting no sound at all from external speakers, rather than crackly or bad quality sound, but the answer about moving from PulseAudio to Pipewire was on point. I also found this help request on the Zoom community forum. It was a bit of a red herring because it mentioned problems with Jabra Speak, which happens to be the brand of speaker/mic that I use by default, and actually it's not a Jabra problem at all, it's a Pipewire problem. But it connected back to the Stack Exchange report I'd already seen, that the problem was the change of audio software. The official Zoom rep (probably a bot TBH) gives the absolutely useless try synching the microphone advice, but other forum users actually properly paid attention to the very detailed bug report. It's also a total coincidence that the Stack Exchange report has a similar brand and model of laptop to mine; actually the issue was the upgrade from Ubuntu 22 to 24 (Jammy Jellyfish to Noble Numbat).

So I followed the guide in the Stack Exchange reply. It was interesting to learn that the problem is specifically Steam games under Proton, because having scared myself by breaking things when I booted into Windows I was playing Wordatro (and other Windows-only games) through Proton. I had to make a few tweaks. First of all you can't copy files from /usr/share/ to /etc/ using the GUI file explorer. I had to remind myself how to use cp commands from the terminal. The solution was sudo cp -r /usr/share/pipewire /etc/pipewire (it took me a little bit of trial and error to get to the exact syntax for file paths). I then followed step 2 in the Stack Exchange response, but ran into a problem because it said Uncomment the next parameter: pulse.idle.timeout = 0. That made me realize that the line I'd just edited also started with a # and was therefore commented out; editing it wasn't going to do anything! I asked jack if I'd misunderstood the definition of uncomment and he said it looked like Dherik's machine must have that line active, not commented, so I uncommented both the relevant lines in the conf file and left a comment saying that I had altered them based on [link]. I exactly followed step #3 and everything was fixed, yay!

So I now understand what grub is, how to get to a terminal from a screen of death, and have some notion of the difference between dpkg and apt (though I am almost certainly not competent to actually drive them without help). And I now have a lovely well-behaved laptop running Ubuntu 24.04 with working sound and no sharks.

Comments

[wychwood]

Congratulations!

The "switch to tty console" thing is something that used to be a lot more common - I'd have to look up the key combination, but I've used it a bunch of times in the past when having issues with graphics and the GUI etc. But I can see why it feels obscure to you! Not an immediately obvious solution in these days of hardware mostly just working.

[silveradept]

Oh, a half-bricked upgrade, oh no. Those are very difficult to untangle, so kudos to you and for forging ahead and getting as far as you did for it to need one command to fix.

And good for managing to get your sound working with Pipewire.

The Konami code is something you might know about if you've ever needed to switch terminals, but you usually only need to switch terminals away from the GUI when something has gone wrong. (At which point you learn that tty1 and/or tty7 tends to be used for the GUI, leaving tty2 through tty6 for console login and possible rescue operations.) I had to learn Ctrl+Alt+F(#) because certain things wouldn't run in the GUI, and because I've borked my fair share of graphical login prompts. I wish things were better documented, but a lot of developers seem to have an allergy to keeping up their documentation.

[sfred]

Well done for resolving stuff and getting help when needed!