[mythtv-users] Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS do-release-upgrade with Mythtv

faginbagin mythtv at hbuus.com
Mon Oct 8 04:17:23 UTC 2018


I have work-arounds for two of the issues Stephen has documented:

On 10/7/2018 11:37 AM, Stephen Worthington wrote:
<snip>

> 3) The ext4 drivers have been updated, so you will no longer be able
> to run fsck of 18.04 ext3 and ext4 partitions from earlier versions. I
> have a separate partition I use to boot to do repairs on my main
> system partition, including doing a full fsck on all my partitions
> after a power failure, and I had to update that to 18.04 as well.  You
> can still boot from an 18.04 live DVD to do repairs, but older
> versions will not work.  So make sure you have what you need for
> repairs available before you upgrade, just in case.  And you will need
> a recent version of clonezilla also to properly handle the new ext4
> updates, if you want to use it to do an image backup of your system
> after upgrading.

I'm surprised Stephen hit this issue with an upgrade. I thought I hit it because I did clean installs and allowed the 18.04 installer to format the file system. In any event, the support for the new-ish ext4 feature used by 18.04 (metadata_csum) is actually supported by older kernels, including the 3.13 series used by ubuntu 14.04. The problem is the version of e2fsck and/or the libraries it depends on in 14.04 (and maybe 16.04) do not support the metadata_csum feature. I was still able to mount 18.04 formatted ext4 file systems on 14.04, but fsck wouldn't work. The work around is to download the .deb file for e2fsck-static from an 18.04 repo, install it on your older distro, and symlink it in place of the older e2fsck, e.g.:

# wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/e/e2fsprogs/e2fsck-static_1.44.1-1_amd64.deb
# dpkg -i e2fsck-static_1.44.1-1_amd64.deb
# cd /sbin
# mv e2fsck e2fsck.dist
# ln -s e2fsck.static e2fsck

Package details (as well as other mirrors and access to the i386 deb) for e2fsck-static can be found here:
https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/e2fsck-static

> 4) The x11vnc VNC server seems to be broken in the new 18.04 version.
> It crashes whenever I try to use the menu on the MythTV box over a VNC
> connection.  I am still working my way through this problem - I may
> have to use a different VNC server.  The recommendation I found on the
> web to switch my display manager to lightdm did not work - I was
> already using lightdm as that is the default in Mythbuntu (and Xubuntu
> I think).

In this case, the newer version, 0.9.13-6, from cosmic of x11vnc fixes this problem. Assuming that you've got the broken version, 0.9.13-3, installed, ensuring you've got the necessary dependencies installed, you can download and install the deb from cosmic. You also need to install the matching deb for x11vnc-data. Package details are here:
https://packages.ubuntu.com/cosmic/x11vnc
https://packages.ubuntu.com/cosmic/x11vnc-data
I downloaded the packages from here:
http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/x/x11vnc/x11vnc_0.9.13-6_amd64.deb
http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/universe/x/x11vnc/x11vnc-data_0.9.13-6_all.deb
Once downloaded, install them together, not separately, e.g.:
# dpkg -i x11vnc_0.9.13-6_amd64.deb x11vnc-data_0.9.13-6_all.deb

HTH,
Helen


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