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Today Ubuntu 16.04 LTS is released. I saw the iso available here. But I don't want to do a clean install. Can someone explain to me how to upgrade?

7_R3X
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Diman Nixon
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    The upgrade will be proposed to 16.04.1 in August. – Pilot6 Apr 21 '16 at 13:45
  • Yep, if you're coming from 14.04 you won't get a notification to update until 16.04.1 comes out. It's possible to do it manually, but I'm not sure its recommended. – mkasberg Apr 21 '16 at 14:28

3 Answers3

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The 16.04 LTS Final Release is not out for upgrade yet but it will be released sometime later today/tomorrow.

From man do-release-upgrade

OPTIONS

   -h, --help
          show help message and exit

   -d, --devel-release
          Check if upgrading to the latest devel release is possible

   -p, --proposed
          Try upgrading to the latest  release  using  the  upgrader  from
          Ubuntu-proposed

   -m MODE, --mode=MODE
          Run  in  a special upgrade mode. Currently "desktop" for regular
          upgrades of a desktop system and "server" for server systems are
          supported.

   -f FRONTEND, --frontend=FRONTEND
          Run the specified frontend

   -s, --sandbox
          Test upgrade with a sandbox aufs overlay

There is one function undocumented in the manpage but you can see it when you call do-release-upgrade --help:

-c, --check-dist-upgrade-only
                        Check only if a new distribution release is available
                        and report the result via the exit code

So to check if the upgrade is already available you can use the following line from terminal:

do-release-upgrade -c

which will give you the following output if the release is not available:

Checking for a new Ubuntu release
No new release found.

and the following if the release is actually available:

Checking for a new Ubuntu release
New release '16.04' available.
Run 'do-release-upgrade' to upgrade to it.

If you want to test if the upgrade will give you errors you can do the following:

sudo do-release-upgrade -s

This will try to install the upgrade without actually installing it. The only error there coming up you can ignore is the one about grub since it is a sandbox install grub is unable to be installed. If you find other errors you should probably rather go for a fresh installation instead of an upgrade. However since it is a sandboxed installation test you can simply rebootyour machine and be back on your old system without any changes happened.

For the upgrade itself if you want to do it and you got the confirmation the release is available you can simply run

sudo do-release-upgrade

without any parameters, which will do then the upgrade.

In the case you don't want to wait and it is shortly before the release (i.e. release day but you got no confirmation of the release already available) you can force an upgrade to the development branch which should be at that point on par with the release itself with:

sudo do-release-upgrade -d
Eliah Kagan
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Videonauth
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Now that the release is out you can do the following:

sudo do-release-upgrade -d

Make sure you backup your system first. You may need to intervene to tell it to overwrite any config files with changes, or to show you a diff so you can either merge it manually or make a note to fix it later.

(The -d flag is for "Development" but it will give you the final 16.04 LTS release. The reason you have to force it in this way is that usually it is recommended you wait for the 16.04.1 point release to come out as it usually contains a lot of bug fixes.)

maaarghk
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sudo do-release-upgrade

That’s the command to upgrade to the latest version, but it won’t do anything at the moment as the latest version is not yet available on the mirrors.

Strange point though: I downloaded Ubuntu Mate 16.04 for the RPI3 yesterday, which was quite strange, since the normal desktop image is still 15.10.

TRiG
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Christopher Shaw
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  • Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/bin/do-release-upgrade", line 122, in print(_("Checking for a new Ubuntu release")) UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xf6' in position 8: ordinal not in range(128) – empedokles Apr 21 '16 at 18:05