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Accepted
Dan
Asked: 2012-04-25 09:42:57 +0800 CST

Should I restart my PC if Unity crashes during upgrade?

  • 772

I am suffering from the bug which crashes Ubuntu when I click Alt+Tab: https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/975168 .

While I was doing a do-release-upgrade -d just now to install 12.04, I accidentally clicked Alt+Tab. Now Unity crashed, Alt+Ctrl+F2 doesn't work. All I have is a blank screen. Usually Unity used to restart by itself but it didn't this time.

So my question is, since the upgrade has already finished downloading the packages and was installing them during the crash, should I leave the PC alone as it maybe still installing in the background? Or should I restart it (by holding the power button or Ctrl+Alt+Delete)?

upgrade unity 12.04

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The exact same thing happened to me. Here is my story:

    1. During upgrade Unity crashed and I basically had access to nothing; Couldn't even open a terminal with Ctrl+Alt+T. The hard disk was still working, so I figured the update was still running, and I left it.
    2. Eventually the disk activity stopped, so I had to assume the update was complete and forced a log out with Alt+SysReq+K, then a restart.
    3. Upon loading Ubuntu again, I noticed I was getting an incorrect screen resolution so I knew something was up. I managed to log in, then ran Updates and was given an error about the upgrade being interrupted.
    4. I had to open a terminal, first tried: sudo apt-get install -f, but this told me that I needed to run sudo dpkg --configure -a
    5. This seemed to resume the upgrade process where it had left off, so I left it for another while. I got a few console prompts about replacing my desktop defaults file, so I guess when I had restarted previously it was waiting for some such reply (but I had no way of seeing it).
    6. After this completed, seemingly with no errors, I ran sudo apt-get install -f again just to be sure. After that I rebooted and everything seemed dandy. Phew.

    Of course if someone else has this problem their results may very, but maybe this will give someone some hope if their Unity crashes during the update (grr).

    • 3

  2. Here is what I did and I managed to restart unity and continue upgrade normally

    1. Press Ctrl + Alt + F1 and logged in
    2. killall unity-panel-service
    3. killall compiz
    4. ps ax | grep unity and killed everything with kill -9 pid#
    5. Ctrl + Alt + F7 done
    • -1