Computers can be so much fun (can’t they)…
After considering the buster-backports suggestion from @Quarnero (who was kind enough to send some additional info about that option via private message), and then considering byzantium (which some on this forum seem to think relatively stable now), I was leaning toward just switching to byzantium.
However, I decided to reach out to support about the firefox-esr update issue first. After a few messages back and forth, @mladen indicated that there was an issue and they wouldn’t be able to update firefox-esr, at least for the time being. He suggested the switch to byzantium was probably the best option for me.
So after a back up, I finally updated my sources.list
file, replacing “amber” with “byzantium”. Running sudo apt update
said there were 1812 packages that could be upgraded. Then things went downhill…
$ sudo apt full-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Error!
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
libc6-dev : Breaks: libgcc-8-dev (< 8.4.0-2~) but 8.3.0-6 is to be installed
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.
A search led me to this:
So I tried the accepted answer…
$ sudo apt install gcc-8-base
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
gsettings-desktop-schemas : Breaks: mutter (< 3.31.4) but 3.30.2-9~deb10u1 is to be installed
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.
Which led me to go read the comments on that answer… the last of which points to this page:
It tries to explain the problem and offers a workaround… that I’m not sure I’m ready to dive into (at least not right now).
As near as I can tell, nothing was actually upgraded/installed from byzantium, so for now I think my sources.list
is going back to amber, and I will switch back to my old computer … at least for general browsing.