Yesterday, I tried to upgrade my HTPC running Ubuntu 14.04 to the new LTS 16.04. That almost went smooth, but some glitches happened at the end and some changes prevented my Minecraft FTB server to start again. The problems are now solved, but I was wondering if I would be able to get this working again.

I had two hopes with this upgrade: get an intermittent awful audio glitch fixed and have the ProjectM visualization work again. From time to time, when I start the playback of a video file, I’m hearing an awful super loud distortion instead of the soundtrack. I then have to restart playback. Usually, that’s enough, sometimes, I have to restart it twice. Fortunately, audio doesn’t go crazy during playback. ProjectM visualization started to fail, I think since Kodi 1.16. It just doesn’t kick in, leaving me a blank screen. At least Kodi doesn’t crash or freeze as some versions of XBMC were doing when ProjectM was unable to access Internet reliably.

CloneZilla failing to start

The week before the upgrade, I wanted to backup the SSD of my HTPC using CloneZilla in case some problems happened. I used an old version I had burned on a CD because I thought this 2009 HTPC wouldn’t boot USB sticks. Well, that old version, although working on my main PC, failed to start on my HTPC. It was simply freezing without any clue of what was happening. Before trying to download the new version and burn it on a CD, I noticed that my external USB hard drive was showing up in the boot up options when pressing F8 at computer startup. I thus tried to boot my CloneZilla USB stick running a more recent version and that worked. I don’t know if my HTPC was always able to boot off USB, maybe this capability got added by a BIOS upgrade. That was a good thing, and allowed me to perform my backup.

Dist-upgrade or clean install?

Several people on forums recommend to perform a clean install, claiming that too much things changed from one version to the other. That may be true in some cases, and that’s probably the safest route, but unfortunately, the clean install doesn’t always detect the drives to mount, requiring time-consuming modifications to /etc/fstab (with copy/pasting of drive UUIDs) and then I would have to figure out what packages were previously installed and reinstall them. I also have a couple of Cron jobs performing automatic backups of my Minecraft worlds that I would need to recreate.

Instead of doing that, I tried to use the Update Manager to perform a dist-upgrade. Unfortunately, by default, the tool won’t go from one LTS to the other. You have to go all the way through 14.10, 15.04, 15.10, then 16.04! Each dist-upgrade would have taken at two hours, making this process a really painful non-sense. Instead, I tried calling update-manager -d and got the option to go from 14.04 to 16.04!

During the installation, I thought that if the power supply of this relatively old system died during the process, the system would probably be unrecoverable, requiring a backup restore or clean install. Aouch! Luckily, no such thing happened.

TeXLive broken

During the dist-upgrade, I got some error messages because the updated TeXLive-related packages couldn’t be configured properly. Why is TeXLive installed on this HTPC? I don’t remember exactly. I don’t need to compile any LaTeX document on this machine so this didn’t seem an issue at all for me. I just asked the installer to ignore the errors and noted down to myself to delete the TeXLive packages after the upgrade to be sure not to run into issues if, for some obscure reasons, I wanted to compile a LaTeX document later on.

Failed dist-upgrade

Unfortunately, the dist-upgrade aborted with an error, no accurate information, just a message telling that the dist-upgrade failed. Argh! The system couldn’t shutdown or reboot anymore, even when running sudo reboot from the command line. I was so frustrated that I considered shutting down this machine, which caused me issues after issues since more than seven years, and never turn it back on again. If I weren’t able to recover from this failure, I could however have restored my CloneZilla image after taking a break from this catastrophic upgrade. In other words, everything wasn’t lost.

I tried pressing the power button a couple of times, the screen became blank and remained blank for a few seconds, then the stupid machine rebooted. At least, the broken Ubuntu installation started up to the GUI. Assuming the main issue was this TeXLive glitch, I opened a Terminal and tried to remove the TeXLive package: sudo apt-get remove texlive. This failed. Apt-get was reporting errors about the TeXLive-related packages that weren’t configured. I tried to remove the package using dpkg, which complained that texlive wasn’t an installed package. I then tried searching for the packages using apt-cache pkgnames tex, and ended up removing tex-commons. That got rid of the incorrectly configured packages and unblocked apt-get.

After this, I ran apt-get update, then apt-get dist-upgrade. That installed a couple of additional packages. Then I ran apt-get autoremove to remove the obsolete packages. This, hopefully, completed the dist-upgrade. I also rebooted to make sure the system could still boot after that.

OpenJDK 8 causing issues

This HTPC is running a Minecraft world my friend and I are sharing. We log less and less often onto that map because my friend plays rarely and I am currently focusing on Agrarian Skies 2 rather than this old FTB Monster pack the map runs on. But I I am considering the possibility of starting a map on FTB Infinity Expert Skyblock pack after I’m done (or completely blocked) with Agrarian Skies 2 and would like to run it on a server with an auto-backup strategy in place and the possibility for friends to join in if they want. I thus wanted to keep the possibility of running Minecraft servers on my HTPC.

Now, when I started the FTB Monster server, I was greeted with a meaningless ConcurrentModificationException. I may be able to retrieve the stack trace, but this is a bit pointless, referring repeatedly to non-sense internal class names. Ok, this is probably broken because of Java 8 and won’t get fixed unless I upgrade the mod pack, which will either force me to start from scratch on a new map, or require hours and hours of work to convert the map, and the map would be quite damaged after the upgrade. In particular, switch to Applied Energistics 2 mod will destroy my logistic network so much that it will require a complete redesign and rebuild. This will be even worse than the switch of Thermal Expansion and IC2 that occurred when I migrated (painfully) from Unleashed to Monster.

Simple solution: run this under OpenJDK 7. That’s simple under Windows, unfortunately… Yep, no available OpenJDK 7 package on apt-get for Ubuntu 16.04! Maybe I could have fiddled something with PPAs or install Oracle’s JDK outside of the apt-get packaging system, but what’s the point of having a packaging system if it requires so many workarounds? I also thought about running the server into a Docker container constructed from an image proposing Java 7, but that’s a bit convoluted and could cause other issues. Who knows if the server will behave well when running in a Docker container? It will probably, but that remains to be tested.

Fortunately, I figured out a way to patch the installation by adding a new JAR to the mods folder. The JAR comes from http://ftb.cursecdn.com/FTB2/maven/net/minecraftforge/lex/legacyjavafixer/1.0/legacyjavafixer-1.0.jar and was recommended by a forum post on http://support.feed-the-beast.com/t/cant-start-crashlanding-server-unable-to-launch-forgemodloader/6028. Installing the JAR fixed the issue and allowed me to start the server!

Totally unexpected, very frustrating

In order to test my Minecraft server, I started the FTB Launcher on my Ubuntu 16.04 main computer. From the launcher, I started the FTB Monster pack: crash. OpenJDK 8, again. I had to apply the JAR patch on my client as well. I did it (instead of fiddling to manually install JDK 7) and that worked. I was able to log on my server and enter my world. However, as soon as I pressed F12 to go full screen, screen went blank and everything was blocked. No way to go out of the game by switching desktop, no way to kill the game window with ALT-F4. I would once again have to go to another machine, SSH into my main computer, kill the JVM, fail, try with kill -9. Instead, I just rebooted the machine, tried with Windows, and that worked. My Minecraft setup was correct. Just the client now requires a different video card or driver to work reliably on Ubuntu, but I changed from onboard Intel HD to a NVIDIA GeForce addon card in 2013 just for that reason. Having to switch back and forth graphic cards from Ubuntu versions to versions is a total non-sense for me.

Kodi is gone

I don’t know exactly how that happened, but Kodi, the new name of XBMC, got removed during the upgrade. Just reinstalling it was simple and enough to fix this. Kodi still works fine, for music and video playback. ProjectM visualization is still broken, though, but that’s not a big deal. I didn’t hear the audio distortion since the upgrade, but it’s too recent to tell if it’s gone for good or not.

Conclusion

For now, I’m not sure it was worth it but at least it didn’t break things. Main functionalities of my HTPC are still there: Minecraft server runs, I was able to listen to YouTube videos, Kodi works for music and videos, SSH is  working properly. I’ll have to see if other surprises are awaiting me.