SystemParadox's questions

I'm trying to upgrade ubuntu, and I'm getting the following error from do-release-upgrade:

Calculating the changes

Could not determine 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 

If none of this applies, then please report this bug using the 
command 'ubuntu-bug ubuntu-release-upgrader-core' in a terminal.

There are tons of questions on here about this message, but all of them are about specific issues, and in most cases the answers are just guesses ("try removing X").

Most answers are based on looking at grep Broken /var/log/dist-upgrade/apt.log, but as others have pointed out this lists many packages which the upgrader did actually find a solution for:

Investigating (0) perl-base [ amd64 ] < 5.18.2-2ubuntu1.3 -> 5.22.1-9ubuntu0.2 > ( perl )
Broken perl-base:amd64 Breaks on perl-modules [ amd64 ] < 5.18.2-2ubuntu1.3 > ( perl ) (< 5.22.1~)
  Considering perl-modules:amd64 7 as a solution to perl-base:amd64 5277
  Added perl-modules:amd64 to the remove list
  Fixing perl-base:amd64 via remove of perl-modules:amd64
  MarkDelete perl-modules [ amd64 ] < 5.18.2-2ubuntu1.3 > ( perl ) FU=0

So, my question is, how do I read this file? I want to know how work out for myself specifically which package is causing is the issue.

Is there any documentation that explains this log file?

1. What does Investigating (0), Investigating (1), etc mean? In my log file this goes up to (9). What does this mean?
2. When it says Broken X Breaks on Y, which package is currently installed and which is being upgraded?
3. When it says Considering X as a solution to Y, why does it then say Adding X to the remove list? If X is the solution shouldn't it be removing Y?
4. If it says Holding Back X rather than change Y, how do I find out why?
5. I realise this is probably working through a chain of dependencies until it either finds a solution or gives up. In which case, should I be looking at the first package in the list, the first package with an error, or the last package in the list?

Default OpenJDK 7 installed with Ubuntu 12.10 works fine. I have a few issues with a proprietary package I'm using and I need to test against Oracle's Java to see if it's specific to OpenJDK.

However, I cannot get Oracle's Java web start to work. The normal java command using a jar file works fine. But anything using javaws shows the splash screen and then does nothing. It even returns a 0 status code (success). No output, no errors, nothing. It just silently dies, even with javaws -verbose.

I have tried both 6 and 7 installer packages from ppa:webupd8team/java, 32bit and 64bit binary installers of 6 from the sun website. At this point OpenJDK is completely uninstalled. Still nothing.

This happens with every jnlp I can get my hands on, including this proprietary package, minecraft, and the Oracle JOGL test.

How can I get useful output out of javaws? Is there a log file somewhere?

The package hierarchy for Ubuntu kernel images looks like this:

linux-generic --> linux-image-generic --> linux-image-2.6.38-8-generic.

Both linux-generic and linux-image-generic are metapackages. I understand the purpose of having one kernel metapackage (to handle upgrades and multiple kernel versions), but what is the point in the second level? It seems that linux-generic only depends on linux-image-generic, so surely it is redundant?