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I have a yakkety system running and would like to do a dist upgrade.

I followed the procedure at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EOLUpgrades however, it did not help.

Apparently, some files are not found. It looks like the packages at http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/yakkety (and all the other directories) are not available.

Is there a new procedure to upgrade or a manual way to force the system to simply do an upgrade? I basically do not care whether I have to do two upgrades first to zesty and then to artful or to artful directly. However, currently I only have the choice to go to artful directly.

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    The only version you could upgrade to from 16.10 is 17.04 which is also end-of-life. That's not to say you can't do it (eg, as a stepping stone to 17.10) but it's unsupported. Jan 16, 2018 at 23:06
  • Because they haven't been moved yet from archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists. Use the main mirror to upgrade.
    – muru
    Jan 17, 2018 at 0:54
  • The best approach was by far this one: andreas.scherbaum.la/blog/archives/… I guess it might be used for other versions too. No fiddeling with scripts!
    – ViToni
    May 18, 2018 at 22:51

1 Answer 1

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It seems crazy, but it's true that you can't upgrade from a release that's only 15 months old, for the simple reason that upgrade from 16.10 to 17.10 isn't supported, and 17.04 is EOL, so that upgrade isn't offered. I hope the developers see the folly at some stage too, but in the mean time...

Follow the instructions at EOLUpgrades up to the point before you run do-release-upgrade, BUT as muru says, use the normal xx.archive.ubuntu.com rather than old-releases.ubuntu.com. Then, you need to edit the file /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/UpdateManager/Core/MetaRelease.py - around lines 294/295 there are two lines which read:

if not dist.supported and not self.useDevelopmentRelease:
            continue

Comment those two lines out by adding hashes at the start. Then run do-release-upgrade, which will now upgrade to zesty rather than artful ( so you'll have to do the whole thing again to go to artful. )

Obviously since Zesty is also not supported, if you run into issues with the upgrade you're pretty much on your own... though I'm guessing many have trodden the path between 16.10 and 17.04 in the past so Google may well help...

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  • Thanks for your answer, it gave me a point to start. I guess this is obviously not a duplicate. Beyond your answer some more stuff is necessary. If any moderator feels to remove the flag, I will make this an answer.
    – kap
    Jan 17, 2018 at 22:59
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    The zesty files are already in old-releases. Downloading the updater fails fetching zesty.tar.gz and .gpg signature. Download manually from old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/zesty/main/… . Modify rewriteSourcesList in DistUpdateController.py to use old-releases . In the case validMirror or thirdPartyMirror, I looked for entry.uri == "http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu" and entry.dist.startswith("yakkety") and updated entry.uri = "http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu". Call sudo ./zesty --mode=server --frontend=DistUpgradeViewText.
    – kap
    Jan 17, 2018 at 23:14
  • It seems the situation is fluid, which I guess is logical since 17.04 was only EOL a few days ago. As of 24 hours ago, they hadn't been moved ( I know, because I had to go through the pain myself! ) Anyway - glad you sorted it!
    – Sidepipe
    Jan 18, 2018 at 9:32
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    FWIW - the file is DistUpgradeController.py (upgrade, not update). :)
    – dannysauer
    Mar 1, 2018 at 4:09

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