Upgrade fails with dangling lib32 symlink (caused by prior installation/removal of libc6-i386)

[Caucaucybu]

I tried to upgrade my laptop with the pop-upgrade release upgrade -f command. The process runs without any apparent errors, with the sources being updated, the downloads of the 2100 packages, then the first reboot to the final processing.

The process runs without any apparent errors, then the message “upgrade complete, rebooting now ...” appears. It reboots, but when I get to my desktop, it’s still on version 24.04. So I run pop-upgrade release repair and then pop-upgrade release upgrade -f again; this downloads four packages, and the same process runs again without any errors, but when it finally reboots, I’m back on 24.04.

apt_history.log
apt_terminal.log
pop_upgrade.log
system_global.log

[Caucaucybu]

upgrade.log

[mmstick]

* The base-files package cannot be installed because
* /lib32 is a dangling symbolic link.

Is this true on this system?

[Caucaucybu]

Yes it is : /lib32: broken symbolic link to usr/lib32

[Caucaucybu]

How can I fix ? Just by recreating the link ?

[mmstick]

I'm not sure at the moment how you have a broken symlink but the error is indicating that to be the issue. It should point to usr/lib32.

[Caucaucybu]

But I'ven't a dir usr/lib32. The nearest is usr/libx32.

[jacobgkau]

If your system is working fine with the broken link, then I would suggest just removing the link. It sounds like you had a /usr/lib32 at some point, but no longer do, and the link didn't get removed when the folder did.

[jacobgkau]

I haven't been able to replicate getting a /usr/lib32 folder in the first place by installing Steam or wine:i386, but from some web searching, it seems like some other users have this problem semi-recently when trying to upgrade Ubuntu.

@mmstick I wonder if our release-repair process should check for a dangling link here and remove it if it's dangling, so this would be automatically taken care of before the offline upgrade?

[jacobgkau]

Ahah, I reproduced it by installing and then removing libc6-i386 (not libc6:i386, that one doesn't cause the issue).

[mmstick]

We can autoremove the symlink then if it's dangling.

[Caucaucybu]

So i removed this link and I upgrade successfully, but when I log in i've a black screen (the system boot and the logging page is accessible). I don't know if it's linked to this issue. If you want some logs i can access and provide them with live usb.