14.04 to 16.04 upgrade issue

[satisingh]

Sorry if this has come up before. I clicked on upgrade from 14.04 to 16.04 and part way through something happened and I’m left with just a shell login screen (like terminal) This screen lets me enter the old login and password but doesn’t have the GUI ?
Is there something I can do to get past this. It says Ubuntu 16.04.7 LTS but doesn’t do much else !

[TheFu]

14.04 regular support ended in 2019.
Today, nobody should be installing 16.04, as regular support for that release ends in April - 3 months from now.

Install 20.04. Between 14.04 and later desktops, the GUIs have drastically changed. Older settings could easily be incompatible. It is time to backup data and manually installed programs, then wipe and perform a fresh 20.04 install. If you have the same hardware as from 14.04 times, probably want a lighter DE, not Gnome3. There are a bunch to choose from, but those only have 3 yrs of support, so 18.04 XFCE, Mate, Lubuntu support all end in just a few months. That means 20.04 is really the only choice for desktop users of older hardware.

That assumes you want a fancy DE and desktop. If you can go old school - say fvwm or pure openbox - then there isn't much risk to having a GUI running on a system that loses support in a few months. FVWM is 25+ yrs old - not many bugs left and few, if any, were network bugs.

FWIW, I've been moving my last remaining 16.04 systems to 18.04 the last few weeks. Most have been relatively painless, but did a Nextcloud+Wallabag+ZNC server yesterday which isn't quite right anymore. It seemed fine immediately after. I haven't done any more looking today. Just some batch processing is failing that pulled feeds every 4 hrs.

[Impavidus]

14.04 reached end of life 2 years ago. Release upgrading Ubuntu after it reaches end of live is generally a bad idea; one should do it before. 16.04 is almost dead, so you shouldn't start with that now. Skip it. And when you're jumping releases anyway, best to skip 18.04 too and jump straight to 20.04. Don't try to fix your system; do a fresh install.

[rsteinmetz70112]

At the risk of being a little contrarian it is possible though pretty risky to upgrade an older system. But a fresh install is definitely better in almost all situations. The exceptions might be a heavily customized or configured system or a system with a lot of specialized software not available in the repositories as a fresh install will generally replace or overwrite all of the custom configurations and software and you will need to re-do them. If your system is a pure desktop then a fresh install will be pretty painless.

What is this computer used for?
Are you planning on migrating to new hardware or have unused storage? If so it would be possible to install Ubuntu in a separate partition/drive and mount your existing /home while preserving you current installation for future reference.

[grahammechanical]

We seem to be giving you a choice of installing a new system and ...? Some ideas.

1) If you have hard disc space then dual boot with the new system and pull out of the old system all the old data that you do not want to lose.
2) On the present OS, at the grub menu select Advanced Options for Ubuntu. Select a Linux kernel with recovery mode. When that load to the recovery menu select Resume. That may load to a desktop using a low resolution open source video driver. If that works then you have got somewhere.

When we upgrade to newer versions of Ubuntu it is sometimes best to revert to using an open source video driver. You may find that a proprietary video driver for your graphic card is no longer supported by the manufacturer. If that is what has happened here you can fix that by running Software and Updates>Additional Drivers and de-selecting the proprietary video driver. Then reboot.

Regards

[guiverc]

It sounds to me like your upgrade never completed...

I would NEVER try and login to a GUI on an incomplete upgrade; you just risk creating problems for when the upgrade has been completed.

I agree with others, you should have performed this upgrade long ago (April 2019), but regardless I'd likely do the following, but note if anything didn't look right (or I noticed errors at any step, I'd adjust this list accordingly).

- login to your system (TEXT terminal only).
- read messages; any errors? if not
- `sudo apt update` (or `sudo apt-get update` probably in your case); any issues? if I saw 'trusty' that is a HUGE issue, as your description would imply (as I understood it) I'd only see 'xenial'. If I saw anything else (non-xenial) that is a problem too
- `sudo apt-get dist-upgrade` and follow what it says.. ie. let the upgrade process complete.

I'd hope to get no issues in the last step step (`apt-get dist-upgrade`), but it wouldn't worry me if there were any. I'd just deal with them given whatever it says (it'll provide clues as to fixes). More commands may be necessary.

On completion of `sudo apt-get dist-upgrade`, I'd reboot and hope system looks good.

I'd likely still login to text terminal FIRST, repeat the `sudo apt-get update` and `sudo apt-get dist-ugprade` but expecting it to report no errors, and no packages to update this time. At this point I'd switch to GUI and attempt login there.

I would expect GUI to login when I reach this stage (unless problems were created by your attempts to login before this stage; but prior early-attempted-logins may create issues, but also may not).

Once on 16.04, consider the next upgrade as you've only got a few months of life left.

If I had problems, I'd likely use it as a "upgrade via re-install" which is my fall-back for upgrades; ie. something-else, re-use partitions and do NOT format, it'll note your packages, erase system directories, install, then attempt to add back additional packages without touching user files/configs (unless server apps with them located in system directories; but desktop apps don't do that, all without touching user files). What software you had, plus the release you want to move to, I would consider before doing this, and of course backup first (I'd expect you've already made your backups anyway).

[grahammechanical]

It has been my understanding that to upgrade an End of Life release to the next release that is in life we must do an End of Life upgrade. We must change the sources.list repositories to ones at old-releases.ubuntu.com. We must do this because the repositories of End of Life releases are moved to old-releases.ubuntu.com.

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

But when I check the index at old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists I do not see Trusty in the list. I think that this is because Trusty (14.04) now has Extended Security Maintenance (ESM). Perhaps this has complicated the upgrade. It is a paid for service.

https://ubuntu.com/security/esm

Regards

[guiverc]

@grahammechanical

ESM complicates things...

Mirrors can decide to not provide ESM (officially or unofficially), so after 14.04/trusty reached EOL, some mirrors may have dropped it (as occurs with EOL releases).

However as ESM, it's archives remain and aren't moved to old-releases from the main archive, plus the mirrors that also mirror ESM (which is a lot).

That was the reason I didn't provide the EOLUpgrades link; it doesn't help with ESM supported releases (I've thought about editing it, but couldn't find a pattern [on mirrors] or any documentation specific to it, it would thus be from my observations, and some discussions with Canonical employees over 14.04's ESM)

[satisingh]

Hi thanks so much for all the help and replies this HP laptop is used for basic word processing and emailing. Not a huge much else.
I really should have upgraded earlier but all was working fine so I left it running as was!

[satisingh]

Thanks for this. Initially I thought it best to do whatever the update system was telling me to do (16.04 was the option so I clicked yes).
I still have dual boot windows so I can login and do some things. I will have to create a 20.04 USB and do fresh install.