Error updating Debian 7 (wheezy) to 8 (jessie), plymouth 0.9.0-9 half-configured

Question

I'm trying to upgrade my wheezy server to Debian 8 jessie.

I changed /etc/apt/sources.list to:

deb http://debian.mirror.serverloft.de/debian/ jessie main contrib non-free
deb http://debian.mirror.serverloft.de/debian-security/ jessie/updates main contrib non-free

Commands:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade

This resulted in a short message about dpkg returning an error code 1.

I have a protocol, created by the script command; there I found:

Calculating upgrade... Failed
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 udev : Breaks: plymouth (< 0.9.0-7) but 0.8.5.1-5 is to be installed
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.

I tried to repair this:

root@myhost:~# apt-get install udev
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
udev is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 73 not upgraded.
1 not fully installed or removed.
After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
Setting up plymouth (0.9.0-9) ...
update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated)
update-rc.d: error: expected NN after start
usage: update-rc.d [-n] [-f] <basename> remove
   update-rc.d [-n] <basename> defaults [NN | SS KK]
   update-rc.d [-n] <basename> start|stop NN runlvl [runlvl] [...] .
   update-rc.d [-n] <basename> disable|enable [S|2|3|4|5]
        -n: not really
        -f: force

The disable|enable API is not stable and might change in the future.
dpkg: error processing package plymouth (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Processing triggers for initramfs-tools (0.120+deb8u2) ...
Errors were encountered while processing:
 plymouth
**E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)**

Information about plymouth:

root@myhost:~# dpkg -s plymouth
Package: plymouth
Status: install ok **half-configured**
Priority: optional
Section: misc
Installed-Size: 801
Maintainer: Laurent Bigonville <[email protected]>
Architecture: amd64
**Version: 0.9.0-9**
**Config-Version: 0.8.5.1-5**
Replaces: plymouth-drm (<< 0.9.0-6~), plymouth-themes (<< 0.9.0-8~)
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.14), libdrm2 (>= 2.4.25), libpng12-0 (>= 1.2.13-4), libudev1 (>= 183), initramfs-tools | dracut, init-system-helpers (>= 1.18)
Pre-Depends: multiarch-support
Suggests: desktop-base, plymouth-themes
Breaks: plymouth-drm (<< 0.9.0-6~), plymouth-themes (<< 0.9.0-8~)
Conflicts: console-common
Conffiles:
 /etc/init.d/plymouth e1440675aa15e8e43da91575295fd2d1
 /etc/init.d/plymouth-log 0f1be14b21796a952e115c03a86787e0
 /etc/plymouth/plymouthd.conf 5c2a5b4b4cb7cbbad0beaab8558200ce
Description: boot animation, logger and I/O multiplexer
 Plymouth provides a boot-time I/O multiplexing framework

Thus, plymouth can't be configured; the configured version is lower than the installed version of plymouth.

What can do to fix this? Thank you!

Update: I tried to remove plymouth:

root@myhost:~# LANG=C apt-get remove plymouth
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 upstart : Depends: mountall but it is not going to be installed
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.
root@myhost:~# LANG=C apt-get purge plymouth
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 upstart : Depends: mountall but it is not going to be installed
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.

root@myhost:~# LANG=C apt-get dist-upgrade
...
Get:150 http://debian.mirror.serverloft.de/debian/ jessie/main lynx all 2.8.9dev1-2+deb8u1 [232 kB]
Fetched 69.6 MB in 4s (15.6 MB/s)
Reading changelogs... Done
apt-listchanges: Mailing root: apt-listchanges: news for myhost
Extracting templates from packages: 100%
Preconfiguring packages ...
Setting up plymouth (0.9.0-9) ...
update-initramfs: deferring update (trigger activated)
update-rc.d: error: expected NN after start
usage: update-rc.d [-n] [-f] <basename> remove
   update-rc.d [-n] <basename> defaults [NN | SS KK]
   update-rc.d [-n] <basename> start|stop NN runlvl [runlvl] [...] .
   update-rc.d [-n] <basename> disable|enable [S|2|3|4|5]
        -n: not really
        -f: force

The disable|enable API is not stable and might change in the future.
dpkg: error processing package plymouth (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Processing triggers for initramfs-tools (0.120+deb8u2) ...
Errors were encountered while processing:
 plymouth
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Update 2: More things I tried but which didn't help:

apt-get dist-upgrade udev plymouth
apt-get install -f plymouth
dpkg --configure -a
apt-get install upgrade-system; upgrade-system

Answer 1

I had the same problem on a systemd-less wheezy server. The solution was to:

apt-get remove plymouth   # also removes upstart and mountall
apt-get -f install        # not sure this is necessary
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get install plymouth upstart mountall  # removes systemd-sysv
apt-get remove systemd

Answer 2

Bug780443 seems your problem. Briefly, someone has solved running:

apt dist-upgrade udev plymouth

I also found this: the proposed solution is install the package upgrade-system to upgrade from Wheezy to Jessie with the command upgrade-system.

Answer 3

You tried before updating to remove this package?

:~# apt-get remove plymouth

or

:~# apt-get purge plymouth

Try to do it, and then upgrade the system. Reply if this fixes the problem or paste what apt show on the screen.

Answer 4

Not the answer, but useful info;

the usual way to upgrade is;

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
> (now change the apt/sources)
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

ie you should always ensure you are on latest stable before switching any repos.

and as a first go-to for resolving dpkg issues, you can try this:

sudo dpkg --configure -a

to fix / re-try failed dpkg actions, and you can ask apt to try to fix any package issues by running:

sudo apt-get -f install

this will either get missing dependancies or it will roll back a failed install.

either way it will try to fix your apt db for you.

UPDATE:

not sure why -1, debian states the same with the addition of "apt full-upgrade".

https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-handbook/sect.dist-upgrade.en.html

also OP should be able to resolve the issue using dpkg configure / apt-get --fix-broken.

Answer 5

Switch you sources.list to us server. German Mirrors are often not synchronised. rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* apt-get clean apt-get update && apt-get -f install and apt-get dist-upgrade