14.04 to 15 Problems

[ChrispyChris]

Hey guys, I tried these steps and the laptop shut off in the middle of the process, now when I boot I can get terminal with ctrl+alt+f1, but if I try for the GUI I get no luck. It shows the purple login screen for just a second before going away to black.


Directly upgrade to Ubuntu 15.04 from 14.04 is not possible, but this does not mean that you can't do this. No USB sticks etc. needed. I do the update through SSH from remote PC :)
Note:
Please keep in mind, that all operations below should be completed under root permissions or sudo, as you are modifying system settings.

Before you upgrade, you need to install these upgrade helpers:
sudo apt-get install update-manager update-manager-core
After that, go to /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades file and change Prompt=lts to Prompt=normal. Make sure that meta-release file in same folder looks like this. If it isn't there, add it at the bottom of the file:
[METARELEASE]
URI = http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/meta-release
URI_LTS = http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/meta-release-lts
URI_UNSTABLE_POSTFIX = -development
URI_PROPOSED_POSTFIX = -proposed
Upgrading from 14.04 to 15.04 will looks like this: 14.04 -> 14.10 -> reboot -> 15.04 -> reboot -> done
Here are the next steps:


execute do-release-upgrade -d in terminal
[follow screen instructions], reboot at the end. 14.10 will be installed
execute do-release-upgrade -d in terminal
[follow screen instructions], reboot at the end. 15.04 will be installed

Enjoy! :)
P.S. All data and software will be preserved. Also after the upgrade don't forget to update custom apt repositories, as they probably will be disabled for the upgrade period.


Is there a way to fix this from the terminal still, or am I going to have to get a USB and just install the latest Ubuntu from it? I have no special data on the laptop, but I'm also without a USB stick until tomorrow and I would like to get it working now.

Thank you,
Chris

[howefield]

You could try


sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

See if it complains.

By the way, hope you weren't trying for 15.04 which is end of life and no longer supported. 15.10 would be what you want, although 16.04 (next LTS) will be released a week on Thursday.. the 21st April.

[ChrispyChris]

Both of those are complaining at me still :/. I really don't care which one I get to, as long as I can get there haha. Is it possible without a USB today, or am I hosed?

[kansasnoob]

Where did you get those instructions? They're almost total garbage #-o

Trusty could have been upgraded directly to Wily:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2312528

Also using the -d suffix with do-release-upgrade attempts to upgrade you to the current development release, but if you changed the "notify of new release" settings from LTS to normal I'm not sure where you're at now. It would have been foolish to upgrade Trusty to Wily anyway because it reaches EOL sooner than Trusty:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

So whoever provided that info should be corrected so as not to mislead anyone else!

That said, if you can boot into recovery mode from the grub boot menu you could try this:

In Recovery Mode the first thing you must do is select Enable networking. That not only enables networking but mounts the file systems in read/write mode which is necessary to do anything. You'll be asked for confirmation so just select yes and then you'll be returned to the menu again so select Drop to root shell. From there you'll need to run some commands to try and recover. It may be necessary to repeat these in no specific order as you proceed (no sudo needed because you are in a root shell):


apt-get update


dpkg --configure -a


apt-get dist-upgrade


apt-get -f install

Let us know how that goes. Remember it's quite common to have to repeat the above commands in no specific order.

[ChrispyChris]

Thanks bro, I got back on to the graphical interface. Now I just need to go about the upgrade correctly haha.