Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Upgrade

A Quick Note To Document The Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Upgrade

I decided to upgrade the Ubuntu Operating System today from 16.04 LTS to 18.04 LTS. The upgrade was successful! The only issue was WordPress. It needed a couple of tweaks to get it up and running again since the PHP version had changed. This article was also helpful. Using info obtained from both articles, I was able to fix the WordPress problem within a few minutes of understanding it.

For many years I ran outdated Linux O/S’s and did not upgrade very often. As a newbie, my thinking was, I didn’t want to break machines that were working. I eventually setup test machines and built them using modern hardware. My old linux machines ran on ancient hardware! Good times! The good old days of Caldera Open Linux, RedHat, and Fedora systems over the years. Now the linux OS is much more refined and mainstream.

These days the hardware is fresh and the OS is kept up to date!

Upgrading from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or 17.10

To upgrade on a desktop system:

  • Open the “Software & Updates” Setting in System Settings.
  • Select the 3rd Tab called “Updates”.
  • Set the “Notify me of a new Ubuntu version” drop down menu to “For any new version” if you are using 16.04 LTS; set it to “For long-term support versions” if you are using 17.10.
  • Press Alt+F2 and type  update-manager -c   into the command box.
  • Update Manager should open up and tell you that Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is now available.
  • If not you can run  /usr/lib/ubuntu-release-upgrader/check-new-release-gtk
  • Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.

To upgrade on a server system:

  • Install  update-manager-core  if it is not already installed.
  • Make sure the Prompt line in /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades is set to ‘normal’ if you want non-LTS upgrades, or ‘lts’ if you only want LTS upgrades.
  • Launch the upgrade tool with the command  sudo do-release-upgrade 
  • Follow the on-screen instructions.

Note that the server upgrade will use GNU screen and automatically re-attach in case of dropped connection problems.

There are no offline upgrade options for Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server. Please ensure you have network connectivity to one of the official mirrors or to a locally accessible mirror and follow the instructions above.

Let the record show Ubuntu 18.04 LTS was installed on 5/5/19 and the server OS has been completely upgraded!

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Author: K6HR

Licensed since 1994. Active on HF / VHF / UHF / Satellite.

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