I tried to update to the new MATE desktop 1.16 but was unable to login after reboot “Unable to start session”.
Used these instructions https://ubuntu-mate.org/blog/mate-desktop-116-for-xenial-xerus/
After wasting some time investigating I ended up reinstalling which was a pain - just a word of caution, I’ll wait for it to appear in the default PPA by which time hopefully it’s fixed.
After wasting some time investigating I ended up reinstalling which was a pain - just a word of caution, I’ll wait for it to appear in the default PPA by which time hopefully it’s fixed.
Just in case, when you encounter that kind of issue with a PPA, if you can log in through a TTY (ctrl + alt + F1 when you get to the login screen) and remove the repo with ppa-purge: it’ll disable it and downgrade its packages to the original version. This can avoid you to completely reinstall the system.
PPAs don’t contain PowerPC packages. You have to compile them yourself.
I hesitate to disagree but I don't believe that's true - see screenshot - all these download only PowerPC (can see 'Powerpc' mentioned against each package in the terminal when you carry out and apt-get install etc.
They will only show you PowerPC packages (hence the 'Software Boutique' shows only a very limited selection) - if there aren't any PowerPC packages they won't download or even show up in Synaptic etc.
When I activated the 1.16 upgrade it was only downloading PowerPC files and similar with the Numix PPA.
Many thanks - I actually tried this but it didn’t do anything, just remained on the login screen but with your suggestion what I realise I should have done is at the Yaboot prompt type “Linux single” which takes me to a command prompt and remove the PPA from there… Thanks for the info.
If you check the packages list from the xenial-mate PPA, you’ll see that they’re compiled for multiple archs, including PPC. I haven’t checked all of them, it’s possible that some PPC packages are missing (which would explain why it breaks the update) but the build is supposed to be automated and there’s no error reported, so we can assume it’s not the case and the problem is different.
But it’s true that most PPAs usually don’t provide PPC packages, they usually build only i386/amd64 ones.
Thanks that explains my confusion over ppc packages being in some PPA’s (I know not all support it but I only add those that say they support it.
Re the Mate upgrade no error messages but another PPC user also had issues it seems - will wait for it to go into the main PPA (if it does - or if/when they release 16.04.2 for PPC) by which time it’s hopefully all sorted.
They contain little endian powerpc, not big endian powerpc which is what topbanana needs. Any downloaded packages will be “all.deb” packages. If these are breaking your system, then @Wimpy needs to set more restrictive package relationships.
