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I'm confused. I just tried to upgrade a Ubuntu Server system from 16.10 to 17.10 .... Without success. All typical ways of updating such an Ubuntu system do not work. do-release-upgrade tells me: An upgrade from 'yakkety' to 'artful' is not supported with this tool. And apt dist-upgrade simply tell me: Nothing to upgrade.

There are tutorials using both tools to upgrade to 17.04 which don't help as now 17.10 is already released. They - of course - advice exactly both ways described above but following them results in the strange situation I just described.

So the questions is:

  • How can I upgrade to 16.10 to 17.10?
  • Or at least: How can I upgrade 16.10 to 17.04 (so that I in consequence might be able to update to 17.10)?

Here's an example:

root@mysystem:~# apt update && apt dist-upgrade
Hit:1 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu yakkety InRelease
Hit:2 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu yakkety-security InRelease      
Hit:3 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu yakkety-updates InRelease     
Hit:4 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu yakkety-backports InRelease
Reading package lists... Done                     
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
All packages are up to date.
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
root@mysystem:~# apt-get install update-manager-core
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
update-manager-core is already the newest version (1:16.10.10).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
root@mysystem:~# nano /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades
root@mysystem:~# do-release-upgrade -d
Checking for a new Ubuntu release
No new release found
root@mysystem:~# lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 16.10
Release:    16.10
Codename:   yakkety
root@mysystem:~#

Of course the key Prompt in /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades is set to normal.

And do-release-upgrade -d leads to:

root@mysystem:~# do-release-upgrade -d
Checking for a new Ubuntu release
No new release found
root@mysystem:~#

Note: The question is: Why is there no update path at all? Even if 16.10 as well as 17.04 is not maintained any longer there should be an update path.

As moderators do not seem to understand either the questions or the answers and associate this question to a completely uncorrelated question and prevent providing a real answer, I don't see another way as to provide the answer here within the question.

Answer: There is no update path. That's the problem. Yes, it's the Ubuntu way to not provide an update path for non-LTS releases as soon there is even a single non-LTS release in between the current release and the most recent one. This renders non-LTS releases completely useless after two non-LTS release have been published. There is no official way of upgrading.

So you have two options:

a) Do a reinstallation with a more recent (LTS) version. This is the cleanest solution you can get.

b) Or do some manual work with risks involved following the recommendations provided in this answer here: Upgrade from Yakkety Yak (Ubuntu 16.10) when its End of Life

This question is - if at all - a duplicate of THAT question just mentioned.

Regis May
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2 Answers2

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First I would like to add that this is a hack, and problems may or may not arrise from doing this. I only tried this with Ubuntu Server 16.10.

I managed to upgrade from server release 16.10 to 17.10 by doing the following:

Open /etc/apt/sources.list :

vim /etc/apt/sources.list

Change all references from yakkety to artful:

:%s/yakkety/artful/g

Do an update and upgrade:

apt update && apt upgrade

Reboot the system.

Alex
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0

I highly doubt that it is really the EOL that's the problem here. I've upgraded VERY old versions without any problems A LOT. Usually (from my experience), simply the very next version is proposed. So Yakkety should be upgraded to Zesty by that tool - not immediately to Artful like stated in the error message.

Perhaps it is a temporary technical flaw due to the fact that 17.10 was suspended for a while due to it bricking Laptops. AFAIK this problem is resolved now but perhaps this is still some fallout of this incident. At least that'll explain why the tool wants to skip 17.10 altogether.

rgpublic
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