Unable to boot: mountall can't find libplybootclient.so.2

Just a brief note outlining how to get the computer booting again, in case someone finds it useful. I assume that the APT cache contains the previous plymouth packages:
- Boot from a live CD/USB stick
- Mount your / partition by selecting it under the "Places" menu
- Open a terminal
- Type:
  sudo bash
  chroot /media/$name_of_your_root_partition
  cd var/cache/apt/archives
  sudo dpkg -i *ply*-12*.deb
- Reboot

This was a short-lived problem. The mountall update is already available.

Still, shouldn't the plymouth update have been blocked by the unavailability of the mountall update? I.e., shouldn't mountall have depended on a specific version of plymouth to guarantee the presence of the library?

I (still) have the same problem - currently writing from Live CD...

this is what I got:
init: ureadahead main process (389) terminated with status 5
mountall: error while loading shared libraries libplybootclient.so.2: cannot open shared object file: no such file or directory
init:mountall main process (...) terminated with status 127

will try to mount into the system to collect information on current packages installed and post them - there in deed seem to be dependencies missing somewhere that brought us here...

Is there a simple way to get a snapshot of installed packages and their versions (and even more important a way to clean it up so you guys don't have to be looking for a needle in a haystack)?

In the case you all just want to forget about the topic as it is fixed already, please let me know instantly so I can go on repairing my system as stated above (thx pablomme).

Still: keep up the great work - I am running lucid since 15days before alpha3 or something and haven't had any major problem before yet and using it kind a like "productive"...

@Groening: see bug #538292 (of which this is a duplicate) for alternative ways of fixing the problem.

The problem here was irregular handling of the plymouth package's soname change. The old mountall couldn't know in advance the library name change was going to happen without a change to the package name; the new plymouth has to declare Breaks: against the old mountall, but couldn't do this until the new mountall had first been built, which required publishing plymouth. Sorry for the mess, the window of breakage was longer than expected due to a build backlog on some of the ports.

thank you so much pablomme, your instructions helped get me back up.

w00t..

  sudo bash
  chroot /media/$name_of_your_root_partition
  cd var/cache/apt/archives
  sudo dpkg -i *ply*-12*.deb

...got me back in... thanks pablomme

In case you don't have a boot CD or USB stick, you can get a console this way:

in grub, before booting in recovery mode, edit the kernel line and append

init=/bin/bash

then boot. on the command line, mount the root partition as read-write using

mount -n -o remount,rw /

after that, you can proceed as suggested.

Thanks everyone, worked for me too.

This worked for me however when I got back into my computer and did an update and restarted my computer, I was back to the same problem.

i waited on the -14 release to update, and all is good