Posted by Vince Wadhwani on Nov 04, 2008

Most of the instructions I've seen for upgrading Ubuntu Hardy Heron (8.04) to Intrepid Ibex (8.10) involve firing up a GUI and clicking a bunch of mouse buttons. That's fine and all if you've got a GUI but if you're on a server then that just won't work. Following the same set of instructions that you did for upgrading Gutsy to Hardy also won't work. Why? Well, Hardy is a LTS release so it won't really say there's a new release for you until the next LTS which is still a few years off. If you're intent on upgrading to Interpid Ibex anyway (I would leave your critical servers at Hardy..) then please read on.

Really there's only some minor hacking that you need to do. But before we get there, let's update our required components:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

Now that you've got the latest version, open up your favorite text editor and edit the /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades file by changing the Prompt=LTS to Prompt=normal

That file should now look a bit like this:

[DEFAULT]
# default prompting behavior, valid options:
#  never  - never prompt for a new distribution version
#  normal - prompt if a new version of the distribution is available
#  lts    - prompt only if a LTS version of the distribution is available
Prompt=normal

Once done, it's just as simple as issuing this command and then following the on-screen instructions.

sudo do-release-upgrade

Happy upgrading!