[Freedombox-discuss] Unmet dependencies, "Applying updates failed".

[A. F. Cano]

Hello everyone,

The FreedomBox has been working great totally unattended, but when I
looked into what was going on under the hood, I found that packages were
not being upgraded.  257 to be exact.  A review of the logs showed that
grub-pc had failed.  As this can be very dangerous to a critical system,
watched very carefully while I did:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Not surprisingly grub-pc popped up a window asking if it should proceed
without imstalling grub.  After researching (and searx wasn't working in
the middle of the upgrade), decided to proceed with "no" and installed
the boot loader in the MBR.  Not sure why grub-pc didn't find the
previous way of booting.  I hope the FreedomBox boots the next time it
needs to.

The upgrades completed with some warnings 

rub-install: warning: your core.img is unusually large.  It won't fit in the embedding area.
grub-install: error: filesystem `btrfs' doesn't support blocklists.

I hope this is about trying to install in /dev/sda1, in addition to
/dev/sda) and thus will have no adverse consequences.

Setting up cockpit-ws (233-1) ...
Warning: The home dir /nonexisting you specified can't be accessed: No such file or directory
The system user `cockpit-ws' already exists. Exiting.
Warning: The home dir /nonexisting you specified can't be accessed: No such file or directory

Should this be fixed in the post-install script?

Also lots of these:

W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/rtl_nic/rtl8168h-2.fw for module r8169

firmware-realtek is probably in the non-free category:

sudo apt-get install firmware-realtek
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package firmware-realtek is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'firmware-realtek' has no installation candidate

But the problem after all these packages got installed is that  there
are still unmet dependencies.  From cockpit->software updates:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  php-common: Breaks: php7.3-common but 7.3.15-3 is to be installed
  libgc1: Conflicts: libgc1c2 but 1:7.6.4-0.4 is to be installed
  fuse3: Breaks: fuse
  libgcc1: Depends: gcc-10-base (= 10.1.0-1) but 10.2.0-19 is to be installed
  python3-django: Breaks: python-django-common
  libmailutils5: Depends: mailutils-common (= 1:3.5-3) but 1:3.10-3 is to be installed
  libgc1c2: Conflicts: libgc1 but 1:8.0.4-3 is to be installed

What is the proper way to deal with this?  I've tried to keep the
FreedomBox completely standard, not installing anything manually.
Could this be related to backports?

The apt installation of the 257 packages upgraded freedombox from 20.17
to 20.19.

The other category that is failing in cockpit is "Services".  It claims
that the calibre Content Server "Failed to start".  It reports it as
enabled.  This is strange since the calibre app is not installed.

I also see this often in the logs:

quota not working (qgroup not set)

What is the reason for this?

In any case, since the unmet dependencies tend to have a cascading
effect, I would like to solve this issue before I get another backlog of
pending upgrades that might possibly make the system unbootable.  Thanks
for any assistance.

Augustine.