Hi Keith,

On Mon, Jul 22, 2019 at 09:14:25PM +0100, Keith Williams wrote:
> I went right back to the beginning and followed through the instructions
> from the link. Got to the installing the kernel and it did load this time,

So I suspect what happened before was that you did not put the
":amd64" on the end of the "apt-get install linux-image-amd64:amd64"
command.

> did the check requested in the article and saw it was the correct
> kernel running
> installed the amd64 dpkg, apt etc as told
> then troubles started again could not get apt to run properly

I did say that stopping at the point of installing a 64-bit kernel
was the easy part and a perfectly valid place to stop, as after that
it gets tricky.

Impossible to comment further without a log of what you did, but yes
you have to do some scary things that apt asks if you are sure about
and it's very easy to completely break your system from here on in
if you don't know what you are doing.

Unless you are confident in what you're doing I don't recommend that
anyone does this past switching the kernel.

> By now I thought this is a nonsense, over the years no end of crud has
> built up, and I have cocked something up.

Probably nothing to do with your past configurations, more likely
that apt doesn't really know how to achieve what you're asking and
you have accidentally let it remove something essential. It could
probably be rescued - when I do this process there are always
periods of time where the system is broken because essential things
have been removed, but I then put them back - forcibly by wgetting
the .deb file and installing it with dpkg if necessary.

So it may be that you've gone too far and really broken it, or that
it's slightly broken and you don't know how to recover from it.

*You* have done a reinstall now, but if anyone else gets in this
position then they could post on here where they have got to and
what's going wrong and we/I will try to help.

Though in terms of good use of your time, it will be faster and
safer to reinstall, assuming you have backups.

> Now I have a nice clean installation, tons of rubbish deleted and
> I can manage the various bind zones and apache website files in a
> more orderly fashion.

It is certainly worth considering that provided you can put back all
your data and settings, reinstalling is definitely going to be
faster than fully crossgrading your system. You can run through a
Debian or Ubuntu install in just a couple of minutes.

> Sorry to have been a nuisance

It's always good to see what problems users are having and if there
are ways to avoid them. Though knowing details of what exactly you
did and what then happened would be good instead of, "it broke" or
"it didn't work". :)

In this case it seems like it is worth reiterating that no one
should try to fully crossgrade their Debian/Ubuntu system unless
they are very familiar with apt/dpkg and prepared to guide apt in
what it's doing when it gives up and tries to remove most of the
system. As it definitely will do when you go much beyond the kernel.

Cheers,
Andy

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