Yay, the new version of Ubuntu is out. With it comes plenty of cool new features (how awesome does the start up and login screen look now?) and also plenty of opportunities for things to break when I’ve become so accustomed to having them working. At least it’s not Windows though — I think I may just gnaw my own limbs off before I have to get forced to upgrade to Windows 7 for gaming reasons.
But I digress, there was one reasonably small problem with the upgrade that I saw on both of my Ubuntu machines (laptop and desktop): python-wxversion has a problem and won’t upgrade. Looking back in the terminal it appeared that either it was an “IOError: bad file descriptor” or otherwise a certain file (well, it did change when I tried to reinstall) like wxversion.py can’t be found in /usr/lib/python2.6. All very confusing.
It was especially worrying when the installer came up and said “Sorry, your upgrade failed. Your system could be in an unstable state.” That sent alarm bells ringing and possibly with good reason (eg broken apps) — at least I had good reason to fix the problem rather than just ignore it.
The solution was simple for both machines:
sudo apt-get remove python-wxgtk2.8 sudo apt-get install python-wxgtk2.8
Not painful at all. Except it was a case of finding which package to reinstall. Don’t try and reinstall python-wxversion like I did because you won’t get far. It’ll still die. python-wxversion is, however, a dependency of the above package so all’s well once you get that sorted.
From Googling, it looks like this problem was common and thankfully fixed in the repos. Although, it was still present on Karmic upgrade so who knows.
Maybe it’s bad Karma? I bet 1000 people have made that joke already…
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