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I have recently been made a temporary owner of an old 12.10 Ubuntu machine so I can upgrade it to the latest(14.04). So I am trying to upgrade to the 13.04 as per ubuntu website, and from there to 14.04, but I seemed to have run into the apt-get bug:

root@camolls1000774583:/etc/apt# 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

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/do-release-upgrade", line 145, in <module>
fetcher.run_options += ["--mode=%s" % options.mode,
AttributeError: type object 'DistUpgradeFetcherCore' has no attribute 'run_options'

I googled around, apparently the fix was pushed in a upgrade and was placed in quantal repo.

But when I tried to run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade all my quantal repos came back as 404 not found or ignored. I am guessing since Quantal is EOL they took away the repo.

So how do I upgrade to Raring without quantal repo?

I have also attached a copy of my sources.list in case that helps. I can't nuke it. I need the user's data intact.

thanks

Edited for additional clarification.

D.Zou
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  • Why? If you -get- a machine 1t -I- would do is nuke the operating system and install a new one. Why would you keep personal settings from someone else? Besides that: 12.10 is end of life. So are 13.04 and 13.10. Save yourself the trouble and format+re-install 14.04 – Rinzwind Aug 01 '14 at 13:45
  • Because I have to give it back to the guy and I can't wipe away his personal data. – D.Zou Aug 01 '14 at 13:51
  • re-installing does not perse mean deleting private data. It is possible to re-install preserving /home/. And ofcourse there is the obligatory backup everyone makes ;) – Rinzwind Aug 01 '14 at 13:54
  • @bain so I just replace all the archive.ubuntu.com with old-release.ubuntu.com? – D.Zou Aug 01 '14 at 14:02
  • Yes, "old-releases" not "old-release" – bain Aug 01 '14 at 14:04
  • @bain thanks for the link. was getting some dependency error but then realized it wasn't a version issue but missing package issue. – D.Zou Aug 01 '14 at 14:26
  • bain provided the right answer

    http://askubuntu.com/questions/91815/how-to-install-software-or-upgrade-from-old-unsupported-release

     – D.Zou Aug 01 '14 at 14:34

1 Answers1

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For the most part you can get away with changing all the references of the old release to the new release (ie: "quantal" to "trusty" for example) in /etc/apt/sources.list (and any .list files under /etc/apt/sources.list.d/), run an apt-get update and then an apt-get dist-upgrade - I've seen very few installations "break" using this hackish method.

But the best way is to ensure that /home is on its own partition or volume, allowing you to easily upgrade or completely reinstall Ubuntu without impacting on personal data because you tell the installer you mount the partition/volume as /home but not to format it.

If the system in question has not got /home separate, then grab a USB HDD, backup the entire /home folder structure to it with rsync -avz /home /path/to/usb/hdd --progress, then reformat and reinstall with a proper partitioning setup (eg: 20GB for root "/", 4GB for "swap" and the remainder of the drive for home "/home"), then restore the contents of /home from the USB HDD, change owner ID's on all files and folders if necessary with a big chown -R username: /home/username command and then pat yourself on the back.

Jeff Sereno
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