Immediately following the download of new packages for the upgrade to Karmic Koala, I noticed it had hung up while attempting to turn off services which were going to be upgraded.
mysql stopping...
It happened that MySQL was the hold up, and because killing the upgrade process seemed like a risky operation – I needed to find a way to move it along.
I wasn’t able to turn up any other posts from the community about this issue – so I decided to take the usual approach: Start killing process with fingers crossed and blog the outcome!
Just so happens I nailed it on the first try:
$ ps aux | grep mysql
<snip />
root 3624 0.0 0.0 5452 1744 pts/7 S+ 09:05 0:00 /usr/bin/mysqladmin --defaults-file=/etc/mysql/debian.cnf shutdown
$ sudo kill -9 3624 #your pid would be different...
The upgrader picked up and moved right along at that point. Hurray!
Thanks, this worked for me :)