unable to upgrade to 13.10 becuse of package 'unity'

[Moses_Moore]

$ sudo do-release-upgrade
...
Calculating the changes

Could not calculate the upgrade

An 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

First problem: it doesn't tell me what the problem is, only some guesses at what the problem might be.

Second problem: None of these guesses are correct. I found out via the forums (not by any message from the software nor by reading `man do-release-upgrade` or any files in /usr/share/doc/ubuntu-release-upgrader-core/* )(which I might call a problem first-and-a-half) that a log file is written to /var/log/dist-upgrade/main.log


$ grep -C3 ' ERROR ' /var/log/dist-upgrade/main.log
2013-10-18 09:26:15,596 DEBUG Marking 'xubuntu-desktop' for upgrade
2013-10-18 09:26:15,702 DEBUG blacklist expr 'unity$' matches 'unity'
2013-10-18 09:26:15,702 DEBUG The package 'unity' is marked for removal but it's in the removal blacklist
2013-10-18 09:26:15,789 ERROR Dist-upgrade failed: 'The package 'unity' is marked for removal but it is in the removal blacklist.'
2013-10-18 09:26:15,790 DEBUG abort called
2013-10-18 09:26:15,791 DEBUG openCache()
2013-10-18 09:26:15,791 DEBUG failed to SystemUnLock() (E:Not locked)


Third (actual) problem: do-release-upgrade wants to remove 'unity' and wants not to remove 'unity' at the same time, halting the upgrade.

How do I resolve this?

I'm pretty sure I didn't manually forbid unity from being installed:

$ dpkg --get-selections |grep unity
gir1.2-unity-5.0:i386 install
gnome-control-center-unity install
libunity-common install
libunity-core-6.0-5 install
libunity-misc4 install
libunity-protocol-private0:i386 install
libunity-webapps0 install
libunity9:i386 install
unity install
unity-asset-pool install
unity-common install
unity-lens-applications deinstall
unity-services install
unity-webapps-service install

... I don't see a 'hold' on unity packages.
(and while I'm looking at the preview, why aren't \[code\] blocks using a monospace font for whitespace characters?)

[evolutionv8-5]

why don't you remove unity before upgrade and install it again after that?

[Moses_Moore]

Seems odd since Canonical itself says that 13.10 is mostly improvements to Unity:
http://help.ubuntu.com/13.10/ubuntu-help/whats-new.html
... but I'll give it a try.


sudo apt-get remove unity

EDIT:
Does not error out this time, though it does want to remove package 'libunity-common'. Curious.

I still wish that `do-release-upgrade` told me what the error message was was, instead of me needing to go to the forums to find out where a logfile is.

[IvarSnaaijer]

I had problems upgrading kubuntu from 13.04 to 13.10 (It started out as kubuntu 12.10, but upgraded in april). I might have accidentally installed unity in the past.

I did get the same error ´An unresolvable problem occurred while calculating the upgrade.´ from GUI version and no clear indication of any specific problem.
I removed all third party stuff (like Medibuntu remnants and Intel driver updates) and today I almost created a bugreport because it was easier to do from the UI, but I changed my mind and found your effords, Thanks !

For posterity :
My logfile (/var/log/dist-upgrade/main.log) showed the same message about unity:
2013-10-18 20:12:40,860 DEBUG The package 'unity' is marked for removal but it's in the removal blacklist

But it was not preceded by ERROR. So for other people I advice to use

tail /var/log/dist-upgrade/main.log

Just after the update failed.

I did
sudo apt-get remove unity

and now I'm updating to 13.10