Update software without upgrading the release or edition

Question

I strictly have to stay in 14.04.1 version. I have already disabled the "New Ubuntu version notifications" (and willing to take any further actions that would make a possible accidental release upgrade impossible). I still get software upgrade notifications and I wonder if it may upgrade the release somehow. Is there a safe command to use for that situation? Regards.

Clarification: My version (or edition, or HWE as it is called) must stay at 14.04.1, I can't even use 14.04.2. I just want my software to be at their newest version for 14.04.1 only.

Your version may get bumped to 14.04.5 if lsb-release package is updated. You could try to hold that specific package to prevent updates. — mikewhatever, Sep 28 '18 at 07:11
Determine exactly which packages must not be upgraded and why. Then use apt-pinning or apt-marking on the proper packages, the proper tools for the job. You won't get newer versions anyway - with a few exceptions, software will use security-patched rebuilds of the four-year-old 14.04 snapshot. Recall that in less than one year it becomes moot when 14.04 reaches EOL. — user535733, Sep 28 '18 at 12:44
Possible duplicate of How to prevent updating of a specific package? and How to find out if my ubuntu is using HWE kernel? — karel, Sep 30 '18 at 22:27

jmidgren · Answer 1 · 2018-09-28T07:30:55.520

If you simply do a normal software upgrade you will remain on Ubuntu 14.04. You can be certain that an upgrade to the next major release (e.g. 16.04) will always require your confirmation, so you may try to upgrade packets at no risk.

Update the package database using

sudo apt-get update

Then upgrade packages with the command

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

... or if you are concerned about package dependencies and don't want any installed packages to be uninstalled under no circumstances, instead use

sudo apt-get upgrade

However, upgrading packets will upgrade your system past 14.04.1 (to 14.04.5 currently). The last digit in this release number is not that special though. It is simply a means to periodically bundle together all upgrades that have occurred since the major release so that the ISO you download with the OS will contain current packages. By doing this the OS requires fewer upgrades once installed in order to get to the current state (i.e. to the latest version of all installed packages). Within a major release upgrades normally only contain security and bug fixes and will not introduce much new functionality and not change major version of tools. (Example: Ubuntu 14.04 came with python 3.4. Although newer versions of python are now available Ubuntu 14.04 will not upgrade python to e.g. 3.6 but only upgrade to 3.4.whatever.)

Unless you have a very specific reason not to do so, you really should upgrade packages to avoid security vulnerabilities.

One such reason could be that you have built (compiled) source code that depend on the very Linux kernel version you are currently using. If you do an upgrade in this case and fail to rebuild the software, it may not work when you switch to an upgraded kernel. If this software that you built was e.g. a graphics driver or another kernel module, your system may fail to load normally.

You should also be aware of that Ubuntu 14.04 is soon End-of-Life, i.e. Canonical will stop providing package upgrades to this release. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases for more information about currently supported releases.

That is exactly what I am concerned about: I need to stay at 14.04.1, I can not even upgrade to 14.04.2 (which is something called HWE I guess). So what I understand is:

If I use sudo apt-get dist-upgrade, the version will upgrade from 14.04.1 to 14.04.5

If I use sudo apt-get upgrade, the version will stay at 14.04.1 and only software will get updated? — Bunk Moreland, Sep 28 '18 at 10:24

Update software without upgrading the release or edition

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