[clug] Upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 problems

[jhock at iinet.net.au]

Sorry to interrupt an interesting discussion and getting back to my problem, the:

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop 

didn't work. I got this:

".... 
0 to upgrade, 0 to newly install, 0 to remove and 10 not to upgrade.
"1259 not fully installed or removed. 
"After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used. 
"Do you want to continue? [Y/n] "

I interpret this to mean that nothing will be added because xubuntu uses the same core as Ubuntu, which didn't upgrade successfully. 

I also hoped that if I answer "Y" the  "1257 not fully installed or removed." packages may be reinstalled. However, answering "Y"  gives a mass of content finishing in:

"Processing was halted because there were too many errors. 
"E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)"

So I'm back to square one. 

I then tried to mount my, encrypted external disk by USB to make a copy of my encrypted home, but there is no mount point in the /etc/fstab file for that device. 

How do I mount my external, encrypted disk which has a Seagate label? 

Thanks in advance for any help. 

John. 

On 6 May 2016 12:17:10 pm AEST, Chris Smart <clug at christophersmart.com> wrote:
>On Thu, May 05, 2016 at 09:32:12PM +1000, Gary Woodman wrote:
>>On 04/05/16 21:24, Chris Smart wrote:
>>
>>>But a separate /home is just so much easier.
>>
>>Easier than...? In a distant past I had a separate /home filesystem, 
>>but a couple of times I was tripped up with incompatible dotfiles.
>
>Yep, that can happen when dual-booting multiple Linux distros and they
>use different major versions of the same desktop.
>
>>
>>It really depends on your use case.
>
>Yeah, that's true.
>
>>I still distro-hop a bit, and 
>>usually have two or three alternate root partitions on the primary 
>>drive, with a /home on each. It's no big deal to copy any relevant 
>>stuff to a new /home, because I still have the old /home, and because 
>>the balance of the drive has my personal stuff, in a separate 
>>filesystem, mounted on /data.
>>
>
>As you mention, having /home on each distro's / partition now splits
>your
>files out onto several partitions, needing to juggle what you have
>where
>and backing it up if you want to try out something new and shiny.
>
>No big deal perhaps, but you get all that for free with a separate
>/home
>partition.
>
>Separate /data helps, you just don't have things like your browser or
>any of your desktop configuration by default.
>
>But then if you're going to have /data it might as well just be a /home
>partition and use different usernames for each distro you install, with
>shared data under /home/data.
>
>Or even with the same username, but still a different home dir.
>
>In each distro you create your user with the same name and UID/GID but
>specify a different home dir and then symlink in anything you want from
>your main home dir.
>
>E.g.:
>/home/chris
>	.mozilla
>	.config/chromium
>	Documents
>	Downloads
>	Music
>	...
>/home/chris-arch
>	.mozilla -> /home/chris/.mozilla
>	Documents -> /home/chris/Documents
>	...
>/home/chris-ubuntu
>	.config/chromium -> /home/chris/.config/chromium
>	Downloads -> /home/chris/Downloads
>	...
>
>Reinstall that distro and just create the same user details and
>everything is magically there, settings, data and all. No juggling
>required!
>
>Now you can just backup /home and you can always get back everything
>nicely.
>
>But yeah, horses for courses.
>
>-c