No upgrade notification

[pwabrahams]

I'm running Kubuntu 12.04.1 on two different laptops, and on neither of them have I gotten notification of the 12.10 upgrade. (I've had this problem before.) What should I do this time to upgrade without having to do a full reinstall?

Here's what doesn't work:

pa@morchella:~$ sudo apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
pa@morchella:~$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
[sudo] password for pa:
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.

My system is fully updated.

[Snowhog]

Launch Muon Package Manger and click on Settings > Configure Software Sources. Click on the Updates tab. Under Release upgrade make sure it is set to Normal Releases.

[jlittle]

This is to be expected, as 12.04 is an LTS release, it's looking for another LTS release. If snowhog's method doesn't work there's a config file you can edit:

/etc/update-manager/release-upgrades

Then

sudo do-release-upgrade

is the command you were looking for, I think.

Regards, John Little

[pwabrahams]

It's already set to normal

The file /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades already has the line "prompt=normal". And now I've added a third machine to the list of machines with this problem. No matter what I try, I get the message "No new release found".

I'm thinking that the problem lies in some package that I've brought in, since all three machines have the same (very long) list of software sources. I got all those sources from the Ubuntu Sources List Generator. I tried unchecking all the other sources in Software Sources, but that didn't help, probably because the damage has already been done. I probably need to actively remove something -- but what??

[pwabrahams]

Another indication of the problem

Here's another indication of the problem:

pa@morchella:~$ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=12.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=precise
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS"
pa@morchella:~$ sudo do-release-upgrade -c
Checking for a new Ubuntu release
No new release found

[pwabrahams]

It's not the "normal" problem

I've verified that the options are set to normal and tried do-release-upgrade (without the -c) again. No better luck. I've tried other options also with the same fruitless results.

Does anyone know the actual logic of how Kubuntu/Ubuntu test for the presence of an upgrade? By searching for the "No new release found" message I determined that it's embedded in a collection of Python code. The critical function seems to be in

/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/DistUpgrade/MetaRelease.py

but I haven't been able to figure out how that code works.

I've also reported this as a bug in update-manager-core, but once people there got past the "normal" suggestion, they had nothing else to suggest.

[jlittle]

but I haven't been able to figure out how that code works.

Yes, I had a look there, and gave up bamboozled. Something somewhere should document why it finds no new release, and it should give a clue.

Regards, John Little