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I am wondering if I am going to do any harm to my virtual system if I save it's state and close the VM while it is in the middle of a dist-upgrade?

Afaik saving the state allows you to resume it with the system being unaware that anything has even happened, so am I safe to Save state and close?

Hailwood
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    I've done this one time and nothing went wrong, since the **entire state** of the machine is saved, I think there is no problem doing it. – Evandro Silva Oct 16 '12 at 14:44

2 Answers2

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EDIT: Sorry, I misunderstood the question and thought you were going to upgrade the host system.

If the update is interrupted in your VM, and it isn't able to resume, you might have to do a

sudo apt-get install -f

to resolve some dependency issues before continuing with

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

If the dist-upgrade is still in the stage of downloading the new packages, I would simply stop it by issuing CTRL C. The already downloaded packages stay in apts cache and there won't be any unresolved conflicts.

Old answer (thought OP is upgrading the host system):

That won't be a problem - the virtual system is isolated from the host system and has no clue if there was an upgrade. However, you might have to update the guest additions in your virtual system to ensure nice integration with the host.

phoibos
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The only problem you might encounter is if the virtual networking times out when offline due to the save/restore.

For example, if the save state occurs when a file is partially downloaded, the remote site will probably reset the connection and hence the download may fail. If this occurs, then the dist-upgrade will fail after the download stage, but can simply be restarted and it will just download anything it failed to get the first time before actually starting the upgrade.

If all downloads are complete and the system is simply installing/updating files, then there shouldn't be a problem.

StarNamer
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