Some time ago, a friend of mine (the one of “How I fought off a Facebook hacker” fame) had problems with his Windows laptop, basically the machine became next to useless. Sadly, while I generally like Windows (there are exceptions) this is something that happens all too often. So I solved it by installing Ubuntu, and even though he’s not technically proficient he’s very happy -the machine isn’t exactly lightning fast, but it works and it’s stable.

But a small mistake I made was installing the latest-greatest Ubuntu version available at the time, 19.04. Now for those who don’t know, Ubuntu has some releases that are supported for a long time, called LTS for Long Term Support, and the ones in between that are… not. Full list here.

So as of January 2020, 19.04 went into End-Of-Life status, meaning you can’t download and install updates the normal way (apt upgrade) any more. And without updates, you can’t upgrade to a newer release (do-release-upgrade) as well. The first symptom is that, while trying to install updates, he was getting errors similar to the following:

E: Unable to locate package XXX

An additional problem is that we’re in different countries, so I couldn’t just do the usual routine backup-format-reinstall everything 🙂

But as usual, Google is your friend! That’s how I solved it from the command line:

sudo sed -i -re 's/([a-z]{2}\.)?archive.ubuntu.com|security.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
# ...wait for like 30min, then restart...
sudo do-release-upgrade
# ...wait for a couple of hours, restart

What does this do? Well everything except the first line is the standard procedure to upgrade: update (i.e. refresh info for) the software repositories, upgrade (i.e. download and install the updates), restart and then do-release-upgrade which upgrades the complete Ubuntu system -always to the latest LTS release.

But the “magic” is in the first line (and let’s give credit where it’s due). This changes the list that keeps the repositories location (/etc/apt/sources.list) from the normal locations (under archive.ubuntu.com or security.ubuntu.com) to the “historic” servers, old-releases.ubuntu.com. For more info, see “Update sources.list” here.

So after that is done, apt upgrade can now install whatever updates are available and then do-release-upgrade can do its job.