Unable to upgrade from 12.04.5 to 14.04.1

[philled]

I am running Ubuntu 12.04.05 (on a vmWare VM, but I don't think should matter for this) and when I log in it says:
New release '14.04.1 LTS' available.
Run 'do-release-upgrade' to upgrade to it.

But when I run "sudo do-release-upgrade" it says:
No new release found.

I've found a lot of posts suggesting things like editing /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades, and editing /etc/apt/sources.list but none of these have worked.

I don't run X on this machine as it's a headless server so I can't use Update Manager or anything like that. So I then tried doing a CD upgrade but pulled out of that when it got to the point of partitioning because it looked like it had failed to detect an existing installation and was just going to do a clean install rather than upgrade what was there.

So...how on earth do you upgrade this thang? Surely it shouldn't be this difficult, especially when there's a command like "do-release-upgrade" to do it?

[dino99]

i'm always using the editing /etc/apt/sources.list way with no trouble. But first i check that no third party repo is activated, and clean the system (clean/autoclean/autoremove/orphan). then simply updating (precise > trusty in your case) and upgrading in that order: languages (gcc, python, ...), tools (apt, dpkg, ...) the meta-packages, then everything else.

That does not take more time than via the often headaches with do-release/update-manager

[Bucky Ball]

It should be showing in the Software Updater that there is a new LTS available. You can just click that. But follow the instructions in the last post re. switching off third-party repos, etc.

[philled]

It should be showing in the Software Updater that there is a new LTS available. You can just click that. But follow the instructions in the last post re. switching off third-party repos, etc.
I don't run X therefore there is no Software Updater with any buttons to click. This is a headless server so it needs to be done from the command line.

[philled]

i'm always using the editing /etc/apt/sources.list way with no trouble. But first i check that no third party repo is activated, and clean the system (clean/autoclean/autoremove/orphan). then simply updating (precise > trusty in your case) and upgrading in that order: languages (gcc, python, ...), tools (apt, dpkg, ...) the meta-packages, then everything else.
Thanks for this. Though I don't quite understand what you mean by "simply updating (precise > trusty)". Do I just replace "precise" with "trusty" in sources.list?

[dino99]

Do I just replace "precise" with "trusty" in sources.list?

yes, nothing else, save it then update and upgrade selecting the packages yourself as i'm doing from the terminal.
that way i can control what is happening while upgrading

[grahammechanical]

According to this wiki page we need to have update-manager-core installed. So, there are 2 commands


sudo apt-get install updater-manager-core
sudo do-release-upgrade

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Upgrades

This is the command that I would use to change the repositories in sources.list


sudo sed -i 's/precise/trusty/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

It changes all the references to precise to trusty in all the URLs in sources.list

I will be using that command in a day or to to change an install of 15.04 (vivid) to the next development release with a w code name (we think).

Follow up with


sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Regards.