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I've been locked out of my Desktop computer for a while and could only get hold of an old installation CD with yakkety on it. 

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

Get:1 Upgrade tool signature [819 B]                                           
Get:2 Upgrade tool [1,258 kB]                                                  
Fetched 1,258 kB in 0s (0 B/s)                                                 
authenticate 'bionic.tar.gz' against 'bionic.tar.gz.gpg' 
extracting 'bionic.tar.gz'

Reading cache

Checking package manager

Can not upgrade 

**An upgrade from 'yakkety' to 'bionic' is not supported with this 
tool.**

I've tried upgrading a few different ways and get the same message that an upgrade from 16.10 to 18.04 is not possible with this tool. Running apt-get update, some of the repositories don't work also:

E: The repository 'http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu yakkety-security Release' does no longer have a Release file.
N: Updating from such a repository can't be done securely, and is therefore disabled by default.
N: See apt-secure(8) manpage for repository creation and user configuration details.

I read in a thread yesterday that you can manually edit the sources.list and upgrade to the next version (still an old one, but a step up), I found out that its called an EOL Upgrade: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EOLUpgrades

I tried this but things didn't work out like I was hoping. Is this EOL Upgrade the only viable way to do this? Will I have to do 2 EOL upgrades (16.10 > 17.04 > 17.10)? I just checked and yesterday I tried to jump from 16.10 to 17.10:

sudo sed -i 's/yakkety/artful/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

Maybe that's why things went wrong. So to do it properly, do I need to run these commands:

sudo sed -i 's/yakkety/zesty/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo sed -i 's/zesty/artful/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo sed -i 's/yakkety/zesty/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo do-release-upgrade

?

As for an alternative way, I have no files or anything on this partition I need to save so it doesn't matter if all user files on it get wiped out. I could make a partition just big enough to hold the Ubuntu 18.10 iso file, can I boot that partition like you would a CD?

EDIT: So I ran: sudo sed -i 's/yakkety/zesty/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

Everything went normal except at the end, I got the same message about repositories not having Release file:

W: The repository 'http://ie.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu zesty-updates Release' does not have a Release file.

Then when trying to upgrade, nothing happened:

$ sudo apt full-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
ash
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John Slotsky
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    It's possible to upgrade your old installation, but not directly. You have to upgrade it to each intermediate release step by step. However, as you don't have important data on it, a complete reinstall of the latest version would be much easier and cleaner, so I'd recommend that. While it is possible to set it up so that you can boot an iso image from your disk, it's a bit complicated, and will probably give you trouble during the installation, because the installer somehow can not edit partitions on a disk from which it booted. Better just go the normal way and use a DVD or USB stick. – Byte Commander Aug 18 '18 at 11:53
  • If you want to test Cosmic 18.10, why did not not just download the daily live? With zsync the first time it will download entire file, but then each day you can get new one with just changes. zsync http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/cosmic-desktop-amd64.iso.zsync I usually never download full file but change name of last previous version to next daily. Or just change sources directly to Cosmic. Note that Cosmic is not yet released and only should be used for testing. I always have last LTS as main working install. – oldfred Aug 18 '18 at 14:22

1 Answers1

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Looks like it's too much trouble to upgrade stepwise like this so gonna take an alternative route. I looked into how to install from an ISO located on a harddrive partition and found this: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/ISOBoot

John Slotsky
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  • Also https://askubuntu.com/questions/1025656/how-do-i-boot-an-iso-file-from-my-drive-using-grub2-on-uefi-machines – oldfred Aug 18 '18 at 14:25