Do not have option to upgrade from 16.10

[Guest]

Hi all:

I discovered recently that 16.10 is EOL. I changed my repos to be "old-releases" and updated all software. However, I cannot find any option to upgrade the distro:
- Discover doesn't seem to show anything
- apt dist-upgrade says "No new release found"
- running kdesudo "do-release-upgrade -m desktop -f DistUpgradeViewKDE" launches an upgrade screen for 17.10 but then says "Cannot upgrade An upgrade from 'yakkey' to 'artful' is not supported with this tool'.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thank you,

[vinnywright]

you could try changing all the entries in your /etc/apt/sources.list from a reference of yakkety to artful and doing a

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get  dist-upgrade

but this may go south on you so if you try it have backups of all your data ,,,,,,,,,,,,a clean install would be the recommended route at this point with your current version already at end of life .

VINNY

[jglen490]

Regardless of whether one does a direct upgrade (possibly a multistep upgrade) or a clean install. Never, ever start without a full backup of whatever data you consider to be important, including browser links.

With that in mind you could just dive into a clean install. If you have a separate partition for your /home, then by selecting the "Other" install method, you could format your / partition and just select your /home but not mark it for formatting. Time wise, upgrading or clean install is about a wash, plus for a clean install adding the time it takes to download and burn the new ISO.

[oshunluvr]

AFAIK, you can't jump upgrades, you would have to upgrade to 17.04 before you could upgrade to 17.10. Also, "sudo apt dist-upgrade" does not ever upgrade your release version, only packages. "sudo do-release-upgrade" is the only release upgrade tool I am aware of.

[chconnor]

Oy, I've just been caught by this same issue. Finally got time to upgrade to 17.10, and found that there is no path from 16.10! I've done this in the past... maybe I was jumping two versions from an x.04 version with longer support. Still, it's a bit over a year old and there's already no upgrade path... that's frustrating. I didn't (and don't) expect support for a year-old version, but I never considered upgrading a form of support. I see that I should start. It's not an intuitive thing.

I was able to convince it to try going direct from from 16.10 to 17.10 by doing kdesudo "do-release-upgrade -m desktop -f DistUpgradeViewKDE" but I don't dare attempt that. Seems doomed.

I tried the hack at this askubuntu question but it didn't work for me: https://askubuntu.com/questions/9967...ts-end-of-life

So i'm left with a reinstall, and trying to figure out which of the hundreds of manually-installed packages I want to reinstall, re-wiring all the weird customizations and scripts i have going, making sure the various encrypted directories mount properly, re-installing python libraries... yuck. I'll see how it goes. At least I have a separate /home partition (encrypted, though, so hopefully that doesn't break...) And I'm terrified to let a new grub touch the MBR on /sda because 99% of the times in the past that has been a mess... maybe it'll go great and I'll be born again on the idea of fresh installs.

It's really unclear to me why a couple GB of idle package archives can't sit somewhere on the internet for we slowpokes, but I won't complain because I don't know how it works in the background. (E.g. gosh, couldn't I download the 17.04 packages myself and keep them somewhere for when I need them?) The last few times I've upgraded have been minor disasters, and always take a couple days of my work/life, so I started being more conservative and waiting until the bugs had been ironed out and I had some time to spare. Guess I should consider sticking to LTS releases.

I hope this post doesn't sound whiny; I'm not really trying to complain, just expressing disappointment and confusion at why this is the case.

[GreyGeek]

You don’t sound whiny, and your post is a good cautionary tale for newbs to learn from.

One recommendation: during your next install use Btrfs as your root fs. Then you can take less than a minute to make snapshots of your system and less than an hour to send them to an external storage device. Then, you can do a fresh install, and before you restore parts and pieces from those backup snapshots, you can take snapshots of your freshly installed system in case a problem occurs during the process. It takes less than three minutes to rollback to a previous snapshot

[chconnor]

I did the reinstall today... went OK. Same typical assortment of problems (pulseaudio/jack problems, multi-monitor problems, still can't set the keyboard repeat rate with the GUI, remembering where/how to install which nightlies repos, etc). But overall much smoother than it could have been. The 'hard stuff' seemed to work fine (my encrypted home was automatically used, and my custom encrypted directories came back to life OK after re-configuration.)

In all, probably about equivalent to having to upgrade to 17.04 and then 17.10 and sort out the same problems anyway, and there's the benefit of a fresher system.

So far so good.

Thanks for the tip on the filesystem. I'm excited about Btrfs other new filesystems... good to hear they are apparently stable enough now to recommend. Maybe I'll do it with 18.04, now that I'm a re-install pro. :-)

[GreyGeek]

IMO, you can't lose with btrfs. I've been using it for nearly 3 years and it has been golden. I started with one HD. Added a second HD as a separate pool, then converted them to a RAID1, which worked perfectly. Later I converted them to a two HD single pool. I added a 3rd HD via an HD Caddy replacing my DVD drive, and I use it as a storage pool. Personally, I will never use another fs. Oshunluver has some excellent tutorials in this forum on how to use Btrfs.

[jlittle]

...I've just been caught by this ...

A couple of years ago, after a reinstall due to old hardware finally giving up the ghost, I resolved to record in a log every customization and package install. I haven't always followed my resolution, but enough to think it's a very good discipline.