E: Could not perform immediate configuration on 'util-linux'.Please see man 5 apt

[copperhead27]

I ran into this problem myself, and I've seen that others have had the same problem when updating from Karmic to Lucid via apt-get. There is a bug in apt for Lucid, and it has been noted on one of the Ubuntu lists (sorry, I lost the link.)

This is a simple how-to and a work-around to the upgrading with apt-get:

1) Update your sources.list file to replace all instances of 'karmic" to 'lucid' :

$ sudo sed -i 's/karmic/lucid/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

2) Run apt-get update:

$ sudo apt-get update

3) Run a regular upgrade;

$ sudo apt-get upgrade -y

Here is where the problem comes in. Apt is looking for the util-linux package, which is part of upstart-job, but someone apparenlty forgot to write the code to tell apt-about this (whoops!)

So, you now need to install upstart-job by itself. By skipping this step you will get the error message when you try to run step 5: "E: Could not perform immediate configuration on 'util-linux'.Please see man 5 apt"

4) $ sudo apt-get install upstart-job

5) Now you can run apt-get dist-upgrade:

$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y

Hope this helps out anyone who got stuck.

[radsdau]

Helped me out- many thanks!
I just wonder how you found out what the problem was and then how to solve it. More clever than me I guess!!!
radsdau

[luigie]

Thank you copperhead27. My problem was resolved.

[JoseRijo]

Interesting. I was using aptitude to upgrade. Instead of upstart-job, I had to do:

$ sudo aptitude install upstart

But that worked great. Thanks for the lead!

[estraven]

& thanks from me

[Neal2]

Thank you very much for this. For the record, the aptitude command should be:

sudo aptitude install upstart

Neal

[oldos2er]

Closed, necromancy.