How to update Ubuntu from 16.10 to 17.10?

Question

I'm confused. I just tried to upgrade a Ubuntu Server system from 16.10 to 17.10 .... Without success. All typical ways of updating such an Ubuntu system do not work. do-release-upgrade tells me: An upgrade from 'yakkety' to 'artful' is not supported with this tool. And apt dist-upgrade simply tell me: Nothing to upgrade.

There are tutorials using both tools to upgrade to 17.04 which don't help as now 17.10 is already released. They - of course - advice exactly both ways described above but following them results in the strange situation I just described.

So the questions is:

• How can I upgrade to 16.10 to 17.10?
• Or at least: How can I upgrade 16.10 to 17.04 (so that I in consequence might be able to update to 17.10)?

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Here's an example:

root@mysystem:~# apt update && apt dist-upgrade
Hit:1 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu yakkety InRelease
Hit:2 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu yakkety-security InRelease      
Hit:3 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu yakkety-updates InRelease     
Hit:4 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu yakkety-backports InRelease
Reading package lists... Done                     
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
All packages are up to date.
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.
root@mysystem:~# apt-get install update-manager-core
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
update-manager-core is already the newest version (1:16.10.10).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
root@mysystem:~# nano /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades
root@mysystem:~# do-release-upgrade -d
Checking for a new Ubuntu release
No new release found
root@mysystem:~# lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 16.10
Release:    16.10
Codename:   yakkety
root@mysystem:~# 

Of course the key Prompt in /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades is set to normal.

And do-release-upgrade -d leads to:

root@mysystem:~# do-release-upgrade -d
Checking for a new Ubuntu release
No new release found
root@mysystem:~# 

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Note: The question is: Why is there no update path at all? Even if 16.10 as well as 17.04 is not maintained any longer there should be an update path.

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As moderators do not seem to understand either the questions or the answers and associate this question to a completely uncorrelated question and prevent providing a real answer, I don't see another way as to provide the answer here within the question.

Answer: There is no update path. That's the problem. Yes, it's the Ubuntu way to not provide an update path for non-LTS releases as soon there is even a single non-LTS release in between the current release and the most recent one. This renders non-LTS releases completely useless after two non-LTS release have been published. There is no official way of upgrading.

So you have two options:

a) Do a reinstallation with a more recent (LTS) version. This is the cleanest solution you can get.

b) Or do some manual work with risks involved following the recommendations provided in this answer here: Upgrade from Yakkety Yak (Ubuntu 16.10) when its End of Life

This question is - if at all - a duplicate of THAT question just mentioned.

Solution

First I would like to add that this is a hack, and problems may or may not arrise from doing this. I only tried this with Ubuntu Server 16.10.

I managed to upgrade from server release 16.10 to 17.10 by doing the following:

Open /etc/apt/sources.list :

vim /etc/apt/sources.list

Change all references from yakkety to artful:

:%s/yakkety/artful/g

Do an update and upgrade:

apt update && apt upgrade

Reboot the system.

Comments

[Panther]

You may be better off staying with LTS releases on servers. You should back up your data first, but you can try do-release-upgrade -d

[Regis May]

No need to backup. There's nothing on this system (yet). But there should be soon: That's why an update is reasonable. And in three month I'd like to update from 17.10 to 18.04 and not from 16.10 to 18.04 if this is possible as that way I'd expect less difficulties - if any - than from 16.10 to 18.04.

[Panther]

If it is a fresh system, personally I would just do a fresh install of 17.10 . Faster and more reliable than an upgrade

[Regis May]

That would cause a major delay. See below my response to Mr. Green. :-/

[Rinzwind]

Small issue: 17.04 has gone end of life. Same for 16.10. There is no upgrade path. You should have sticked with 16.04 if it is a production server. It is an LTS for a reason ;)

[Regis May]

Damn. That#s plausible ... And would explain that phenomenon. Then I'm wondering why they still offer that old image :-/ Thank you very much. Please post your comment below as an answer for me to accept it.

[Regis May]

@Rinzwind: You know, what I really find confusing? The message provided by this system: New release '17.10' available. Run 'do-release-upgrade' to upgrade to it. And doing exactly this won't work. See above :-/

[Regis May]

No. Please read: See above.

[kap]

I recently did the same. See the answer and its comments in askubuntu.com/questions/996768/… to get a hint. You do need some Python skills to manage the update Yakkety -> Zesty -> Artful. As the questions are all closed, I cannot elaborate further.

[Regis May]

Well, THAT's finally a helpful comment. Thank you! Yes, the general way of how to deal with questions on these question answering platforms is quite a bit strange. Real difficult and complex topics do not seem to be in favor, only quite trivial ones like "how do I print to STDOUT in python". Nevertheless thank you. And by the way: I decided to perform a full system reinstallation instead of a release upgrade.

[Regis May]

You're right. That really is a hack. It might work, but you'll understand that I'll first attempt to get a more recent Ubuntu image before I'll attempt such a hack. Nevertheless thank you for sharing this idea.

[karel]

You missed the point of the error message which is that yakkety can't be upgraded to zesty anymore because zesty has been EOL too since January 13, 2018.

[rgpublic]

Ah, yes. You are indeed right. But: askubuntu.com/questions/996768/…

[Regis May]

Which error message? The only message is: There is no update path. Nevertheless other Ubuntu message recommends: Please Update. There is a contradiction. And furthermore: The assumption that EOL is causing this would imply that Ubuntu deliberately removed an update path in the mean while. I never heard of such an activity and it seems to be strange to do something like that. Correct me if I'm wrong but EOL typically only means: "We don't update the packages any more", but not "don't keep the rules for updating packages".

[Regis May]

correction: "we don't keep the rules for updating packages any more".

[Ryan Jackman]

This worked for me, I couldn't find a proper way to go from 16.10 to 17.10. No other tools let me go to 17.04 as an intermediate step either.

[Sandeep C]

This worked for me but had a lot of complications which had to be dealt with later.