How do I upgrade an end-of-life Ubuntu distribution?

Question

My do-release-upgrade fails. I get the following error message:

Checking for a new Ubuntu release
Your Ubuntu release is not supported anymore.
For upgrade information, please visit:
http://www.ubuntu.com/releaseendoflife

Err Upgrade tool signature
  404  Not Found [IP: 2001:67c:1360:8c01::19 80]
Err Upgrade tool
  404  Not Found [IP: 2001:67c:1360:8c01::19 80]
Fetched 0 B in 0s (0 B/s)
WARNING:root:file 'raring.tar.gz.gpg' missing
Failed to fetch
Fetching the upgrade failed. There may be a network problem.

So it says my version is not supported anymore. I have Ubuntu Quantal (12.10). What should I do now?

It might not hurt to mention which version you currently have. Also, do you have any network problems? — jscott, Aug 20 '14 at 12:41
No, no networking problems. I've got Ubuntu quantal (12.10). — www.data-blogger.com, Aug 20 '14 at 12:56
I have a system, which was installed with 13.04 and upgraded from that to 13.10 and later to 14.04. But I upgraded to 13.10 long before 14.04 was released, so things may have changed. It might be that upgrading directly from 13.04 to 14.04 is not supported, and it might be that upgrading to 13.10 is no longer supported. When upgrading from 12.04 to 14.04 I found that the `-p` parameter was required in order to perform the upgrade, though the error message I got was different. — kasperd, Aug 20 '14 at 13:00
@Kevin `raring` is 13.04. Are you trying to upgrade from 12.10 to 13.04? The supported releases are 12.04 and 14.04. I guess you want to upgrade to 14.04. If you would be going through 13.04 and 13.10 to get there it is going to take a while, it might be less work to do a fresh install of 14.04 instead of running through three upgrades. So the real question might actually be how to upgrade directly to 14.04 LTS. Which release does it chose, if you run `do-release-upgrade -p`? — kasperd, Aug 20 '14 at 13:06
Hi, thanks for your answer! If I add the -p parameter, then I get exactly the same message: — www.data-blogger.com, Aug 20 '14 at 13:20
root@vps8202:~# do-release-upgrade -p Checking for a new Ubuntu release Your Ubuntu release is not supported anymore. For upgrade information, please visit: ... Err Upgrade tool signature 404 Not Found [IP: 2001:67c:1360:..::18 80] Err Upgrade tool 404 Not Found [IP: ...::18 80] Fetched 0 B in 0s (0 B/s) WARNING:root:file 'raring.ta — www.data-blogger.com, Aug 20 '14 at 13:21

score 19 · Answer 1 · edited Mar 16 '21 at 14:14

19

I had this exact same issue and this answer solved the issue for me.

In summary:

The repositories for older releases that are not supported get moved to an archive server. There are repositories available at http://old-releases.ubuntu.com

So you have to rewrite your /etc/apt/sources.list file in order to use this server. Use the following sed command to do this:

sudo sed -i -e 's/archive.ubuntu.com\|security.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

Also comment out any entries in sources.list that point to mx.* servers

Now you are ready to do your update:

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

edited Mar 16 '21 at 14:14

homer

103
2

answered Oct 27 '14 at 21:49

Jeff Sheffield

317
2
5

nope: `E: GPG error: http://us.old-releases.ubuntu.com trusty InRelease: Clearsigned file isn't valid, got 'NODATA' (does the network require authentication?)` – noahz Jan 17 '16 at 19:13
1

Your sed command didn't work for me because my existing URLs started with `us.`, I had to do `sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list` and manually remove the `us.` part from all the URLs. After that I got some `Err:5 http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu groovy Release 404 Not Found [IP: ` and `Updating from such a repository can't be done securely, and is therefore disabled by default` errors/warnings, which was concerning. So I just gave up and spun up a new server with a newer OS from scratch and copied over my files... – Boris Verkhovskiy Dec 05 '21 at 04:14
An upgrade from 'groovy' to 'impish' is not supported with this tool. === Command terminated with exit status 1 (Tue Apr 5 17:15:37 2022) === – Michael Paccione Apr 06 '22 at 00:15
I got the same error as Michael. Just to try what happens, I ran `sudo do-release-upgrade --proposed`, and it seems to have worked. No clue what's different. – JiK Jul 09 '22 at 16:27

score 10 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 11 '15 at 15:42

You have to change all apt-sources from archive.ubuntu.com or security.ubuntu.com to "old-releases.ubuntu.com".

If you use the standard hostnames, as described above, you an replace this using:

sudo sed -i -e 's/archive.ubuntu.com\|security.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

If you are using subdomains of mirrors in your country (e.g. "us.archive.ubuntu.com") use this command:

sudo sed -i -e 's/us.archive.ubuntu.com\|us.security.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

old-releases.ubuntu.com doesn't support country-code-subdomains.

score 8 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 20 '20 at 20:24

8

Change all of your apt-sources to "old-releases.ubuntu.com". This sed command works with any/all ubuntu.com URLs and saves a backup copy in case you need to revert:

sudo sed -i.save -e 's/\/\/.*ubuntu.com/\/\/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

Upgrade all packages in your current (old and outdated) release and make sure you have the update manager installed:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

Reboot:

sudo reboot

Upgrade to the latest release:

sudo do-release-upgrade

answered Apr 20 '20 at 20:24

Earl Ruby

369
3
5

Thanks, that allowed me to upgrade from 19.04 to 20.04 (via 19.10). – Cleb May 23 '20 at 20:17
My old machine has 17.04 and this didn't do it. – Patrick Jul 16 '20 at 23:39
Trying again after doing `s/zesty/artful/g` and seems to be making progress. – Patrick Jul 17 '20 at 00:05
@Patrick what? how did you get it to work? zesty artful what? – CQM Jan 09 '21 at 05:45
1

@CQM I manually bumped the distribution it was looking for to the one dist-upgrade was supposed to use. – Patrick Jan 12 '21 at 20:03
@Patrick I ended up adding a volume and copying my stored files, and connecting that volume to a new compute instance with new version of Ubuntu. Data center convenience. I don't consider that practical for everyone, but that's what I did! – CQM Jan 13 '21 at 00:11
This broke my sources.list. – fsevenm Jan 24 '22 at 18:39

Mikolaj Buchwald · Answer 4 · 2022-08-03T14:16:02.737

2

Edit: After some time, Ubuntu's archive.ubuntu.com repositories are moved to old-releases.ubuntu.com. This is what happened for the tar I linked. I updated the link. Moreover, it seems that the bug will be (or already is) resolved: see Ubuntu Bug #1975533

I had similar problem. The only way of upgrading that worked in my case was:

wget http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hirsute-updates/main/dist-upgrader-all/current/hirsute.tar.gz
tar -xvf hirsute.tar.gz
sudo ./hirsute

Details here: https://blog.invid.eu/2022/02/24/upgrade-eol-ubuntu-server-from-20-10-to-21-10-an-upgrade-from-groovy-to-impish-is-not-supported-with-this-tool-ubuntu-ubuntugeek-ubuntu-linux-eol-upgrade/

I wanted to upgrade from 20.10 to 22.04, but the intermediate step was to upgrade from 20.10 to 21.04. Nevertheless, the procedure should work for any past and future Ubuntu distribution.

Note! Before running the UpgradeTool I added the old-releases. to the domains/entries in the /etc/apt/sources.list. Operation similar to the one described in randomcontrol's answer:

sudo sed -i -e 's/archive.ubuntu.com\|security.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

so that the:

sudo apt-get update

would work.

Additional information on that approach in the official documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EOLUpgrades

edited Aug 03 '22 at 14:16

answered May 20 '22 at 22:22

Mikolaj Buchwald

21
5

I got a 404 from the given wget url. – Shon Aug 02 '22 at 21:26
1

Hi, `archive.ubuntu.com` for this package has been changed to `old-releases.ubuntu.com`. I updated the link in my answer. – Mikolaj Buchwald Aug 03 '22 at 14:16
Thank for the update and the tip! – Shon Aug 06 '22 at 02:46
Worked for me and my 21.10 box, which I neglected a little bit. I initally planned to wait for the 22.04.1 release, however, I am too late for the party since support for 21.10 ended in July and 22.04.1 is planned for August (not yet released at the time of writing). – Dohn Joe Aug 09 '22 at 16:17
I’m glad it worked for you! – Mikolaj Buchwald Aug 10 '22 at 20:31

score -1 · Answer 5 · answered Mar 29 '22 at 03:57

-1

Check this out https://butlerraines.com/code-stuff/upgrading-end-life-eol-ubuntu-version-ubuntu-1904

This is for Ubuntu 19.04 but should work for any distro.

answered Mar 29 '22 at 03:57

Kanishq Sarkar

1

1

Please don't post link only questions, they become useless when the link dies. Instead, post the essentials and link to the source for reference. – Gerald Schneider Mar 29 '22 at 04:48
1

While this link may answer the question, it is better to include the essential parts of the answer here and provide the link for reference. Link-only answers can become invalid if the linked page changes. - [From Review](/review/late-answers/516666) – Davidw Apr 01 '22 at 03:28
1

As it’s currently written, your answer is unclear. Please [edit] to add additional details that will help others understand how this addresses the question asked. You can find more information on how to write good answers [in the help center](/help/how-to-answer). – Community Apr 02 '22 at 12:22

How do I upgrade an end-of-life Ubuntu distribution?

5 Answers5

Linked