#Sysadmin Chronicles #LinuxMint #Debian

Last night I wound up dealing with one of the wildest debian breakages I’ve ever seen. It was quiet the project to work through, but in the end we got everything working again.

While I honestly am not sure exactly what happened, I’m fairly sure it was a combination of (mostly) user error, and automatic-updates being enabled.

My user errors/ Mistakes that I know of: Distro is LinuxMint Debian Edition, and the sources for apt used the “stable” tag (instead of ie bookworm), the mint repos use the codename which was faye for LMDE6. Normally I’m used to setting up pure debian and then adding MINT repos if necessary, but this server was setup as “LMDE” from the start, so it priorities Mint versions of things like cinnamon (this ended up being a major dependency issue for apt) . Mint doesnt have a “stable” tag for their repos, so its only goes by codename, in this case the major mistake seems to be that before confirming the switch from 12 to 13 the mint sources.list should have been changed to the codename “gigi”

With debian 13 recently becoming released as “stable”, so that meant a dist-upgrade was due for the system, but we had not gotten around to it (this server gets very little tinkering unless something breaks, thus why auto updates had been enabled)

At some point since the move from 12 to 13, An individual package or 2 was installed onto the server (and maybe a dependency or 2 if it had them) without doing a full upgrade. Because it was the first time since the move, apt mentions/warns about how the stable version has changed and asks to confirm the transition, This tells debian its now okay to upgrade everything to the new 13 versions.

Later Debian auto update goes to do its thing, runs into some kind of an issue with version/dependency conflicts due to the mix of debian 13 and LMDE “faye” that prevents the installation/upgrade of a number of essential packages. but instead of reverting changes and going back to old versions, it leaves the packages no longer installed. packages like cinnamon-desktop and fish and bash shell… (or packages for libs that these essentials need to be able to start)

So after maybe an hour of trying to figure out how to reinstall everything and undo stuff, we decide to cut our losses, do a full backup/format/reinstall…. this time with just a pure Debian 13 and no Mint.

After that restoring the backups went smoothly and overall this server was overdue for a good refresh anyway.