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I can't upgrade to 17.10 as it's not supported, I can't update to 17.04 and I can't install packages. I added old-releases etc. It's not worked for all apps. Why does Canonical not provide tool/instructions?

Melebius
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Vitaliy_P
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1 Answers1

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Ubuntu only supports upgrading from LTS (long term support) to LTS, or from one intermediate version to the next. If you are going to use intermediate versions, you have to update every 6 months to avoid being caught in this situation.

Make a backup of important data before attempting updates in case something goes wrong. You have three options:

Fresh Install

Do a fresh install of 16.04 (LTS) or 17.10. In the options menu elect "Something else", specify the partition to use, and make sure the "Do Not Format" is marked. If you don't format the drive then your personal files should be safe.

Wait for 18.04

18.04 is the next LTS, It will be released in April. Perhaps you will be allowed to upgrade to it.

Manually upgrade

Manually upgrading is not officially supported and requires knowledge of package management.

  1. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change "yackkety' to "artful". And save.

  2. Do the following commands:

    sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get autoremove
  3. Now you will likely have some obsolete package left behind as dist-upgrade does as few removals as possible. So we need to clean up. I find aptitude is an excellent tool for this. Open aptitude and navigate to the "Obsolete Packages" heading. these packages were replaced by another package but were not removed because they break other packages. In most cases the package they break was also obsoleted; however, carefully review what aptitude will do when removing each package.

Note: 17.10 uses Wayland by default instead of Xorg, so this third step may be lengthy in your case. This change may also cause this method to fail horribly.

ravery
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