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I would like to upgrade (can do gradually to 13, 14, 15 etc) but none of the site are available.

Tried:

sudo apt-get upgrade 
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade 
sudo update-manager -d

Nothing works. I cannot even install aptitude. I am stuck for good?

David Foerster
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Simon
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1 Answers1

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I agree with @karel and strongly recommend making a backup of /home and doing a fresh install. It may be possible to use the 16.04 Live iso to mount your existing hard drive and delete everything but /home on the drive, follwed by a reinstall from using the Ubuntu installer on the iso (could be a usb stick of course). But this is more error prone. If you have an easy way of copying the user data to an external disk, do that.

Also, I would also copy the details of the user accounts that you wish to preserve, perhaps by copying the /etc/passwd itself and taking special note of the uid and gid values. Then, to restore your files, make new accounts using adduser using the previous uid and gid values. Then you can copy back the user data to the new user directories. Even if you don't copy the /etc/passwd data, you can always get the uid and gid values from the copied /home file system itself using ls -na; uid and gid will be the 3rd and 4th column. You can find the current values in /etc/groups.

Alternatively, you can simply make new accounts for your users, copy the old user data from your backup for each user to /home/user, and do a chown -R user:group /home/user.

Martin W
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