I have a VPS hosted 1500 km away. It originally came with 9.10 - and this morning I decided that I really should get to an LTS release, and figured I'd jump to 12.04.

Researching, I discovered that there is no direct path between 9.10 and 12.04, but that I could upgrade via 10.04. After backing up my data, I dove in. The upgrade to 10.04 was successful, and I proceeded to upgrade to 12.04.

Things started to go wrong.

First, I got an error with GLIBC - I retried and got the same error. That's when I stopped the upgrade. I then tried another round of apt-get update && apt-get upgrade and got a list of "unmet dependencies":

  apt: Depends: ubuntu-keyring but it is not going to be installed
       Depends: libc6 (>= 2.15) but 2.11.1-0ubuntu7.11 is to be installed
       Depends: libstdc++6 (>= 4.6) but 4.4.3-4ubuntu5.1 is to be installed
       PreDepends: dpkg (>= 1.15.7.2) but 1.15.5.6ubuntu4.6 is to be installed
  apt-utils: Depends: libapt-pkg-libc6.10-6-4.8
  libapt-inst1.4: Depends: libc6 (>= 2.14) but 2.11.1-0ubuntu7.11 is to be installed
  libapt-pkg4.12: Depends: libc6 (>= 2.15) but 2.11.1-0ubuntu7.11 is to be installed
                  Depends: libstdc++6 (>= 4.6) but 4.4.3-4ubuntu5.1 is to be installed
  libc6: Depends: libc-bin (= 2.11.1-0ubuntu7.11) but 2.15-0ubuntu10.2 is to be installed
  libept0: Depends: libapt-pkg-libc6.10-6-4.8
  libnih-dbus1: Depends: libnih1 (= 1.0.3-4ubuntu9) but 1.0.1-1 is to be installed

I tried to see if I could do something about these - using apt-get -f install. This told me that I would need to upgrade my kernel. I found instructions on how to do this, but when I ran apt-get to install the new linux headers, I got the same dependency errors.

I found another answer here where someone else had had an interruption in their upgrade - and tried the solution that worked for them: sudo apt-get -f dist-upgrade

This resulted in the error:

E: Could not perform immediate configuration on 'python2.7-minimal'.Please see man 5 apt.conf under APT::Immediate-Configure for details. (2)

I tried to resolve this by:

apt-get install -o APT::Immediate-Configure=false -f apt python-minimal

But this simply ended up with this last list of dependency errors:

apt: Depends: ubuntu-keyring but it is not going to be installed
       Depends: libc6 (>= 2.15) but 2.11.1-0ubuntu7.11 is to be installed
       Depends: libstdc++6 (>= 4.6) but 4.4.3-4ubuntu5.1 is to be installed
       PreDepends: dpkg (>= 1.15.7.2) but 1.15.5.6ubuntu4.6 is to be installed
  apt-utils: Depends: libapt-pkg-libc6.10-6-4.8
  libapt-inst1.4: Depends: libc6 (>= 2.14) but 2.11.1-0ubuntu7.11 is to be installed
  libapt-pkg4.12: Depends: libc6 (>= 2.15) but 2.11.1-0ubuntu7.11 is to be installed
                  Depends: libstdc++6 (>= 4.6) but 4.4.3-4ubuntu5.1 is to be installed
  libc6: Depends: libc-bin (= 2.11.1-0ubuntu7.11) but 2.15-0ubuntu10.2 is to be installed
  libept0: Depends: libapt-pkg-libc6.10-6-4.8
  libnih-dbus1: Depends: libnih1 (= 1.0.3-4ubuntu9) but 1.0.1-1 is to be installed
  python: Depends: python-minimal (= 2.6.5-0ubuntu1) but 2.7.3-0ubuntu2 is to be installed
  python-apt: Depends: libapt-pkg-libc6.10-6-4.8
  python-minimal: Depends: python2.7-minimal (>= 2.7.3) but it is not going to be installed
                  Breaks: python-support (< 1.0.10ubuntu2) but 1.0.4ubuntu1 is to be installed
  synaptic: Depends: libapt-pkg-libc6.10-6-4.8

Any ideas on how to dig out of this hole?