[ale] Never update before coffee - what now?

[Neal Rhodes]

Ok, I did a dumb user thing several weeks ago. 

My HP notebook was booted to Ubuntu 10.x LTS.   On a Saturday morning, I
made the mistake of firing it up before the coffee had fired me up.
The Ubuntu Upgrade Manager wanted my attention, and I will confess I
poked something and I wasn't awake to fully know.    I MAY have poked
the 'New Ubuntu Release '12.04.2 LTS' is available;  I just wasn't
awake.    I know it did a lot more churning than I would have expected
for a normal update. 

Now, here's the extra excitement - Ubuntu 11 won't even boot on this HP
Pavillion dv7-1245dx.   I mean the Canonical staff were amazed at a
linux show that it wouldn't boot their USB a couple of years ago.  It
did a bunch of video noodling and gave up.   I have no reason to be
assured that Ubuntu 12 will boot successfully. 

So now, when the update manager runs, and I tell it to install the 36
updates it has listed, it says

        Not all updates can be installed
        Run a partial upgrade, to install as many updates as possible.
        This can be caused by 
        
                A previous upgrade that didn't complete
                Problems with some of the installed software
                Unofficial software packages not provided by Ubuntu
                Normal changes of a pre-release version of ubuntu
                

It's still offering an upgrade button up at the top for 12.04.2 LTS. 

This lends credence to the notion that while asleep I did poke the
upgrade button and it's started the process. 

I haven't rebooted since, but really can't put this off forever.   

The contents of the /boot directory don't look like there's a new Ubuntu
12 kernel...
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  647151 2012-09-24 14:11 abi-2.6.32-44-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  647369 2013-01-02 18:24 abi-2.6.32-45-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  110567 2012-09-24 14:11 config-2.6.32-44-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  110589 2013-01-02 18:24 config-2.6.32-45-generic
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root    4096 2013-02-02 08:25 grub
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8377971 2012-10-25 22:04
initrd.img-2.6.32-44-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8379002 2013-02-02 08:25
initrd.img-2.6.32-45-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  160280 2010-03-23 05:40 memtest86+.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2161072 2012-09-24 14:11
System.map-2.6.32-44-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2162442 2013-01-02 18:24
System.map-2.6.32-45-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    1336 2012-09-24 14:12
vmcoreinfo-2.6.32-44-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    1336 2013-01-02 18:25
vmcoreinfo-2.6.32-45-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4063584 2012-09-24 14:11
vmlinuz-2.6.32-44-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4065152 2013-01-02 18:24
vmlinuz-2.6.32-45-generic

It has however decided that it wants to reboot. 

Are there places in Ubuntu where it has recorded some textual evidence
regarding what upgrade/update processing it intends to do, and can I
undo or cancel those actions?

I don't mind eventually doing the upgrade, once I get a chance to burn
and ISO and verify it can actually boot. 
 

Neal Rhodes 
who gets to wear the dumb user hat this month. 


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