Upgrading ubuntu 15.04 to 15.10 and to 16.04

upgrade-script.md

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-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

mkdir wily && cd wily
wget http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/wily-updates/main/dist-upgrader-all/current/wily.tar.gz
tar -xzf wily.tar.gz

sed -i -re 's/([a-z]{2}\.)?archive.ubuntu.com|security.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g' Ubuntu.info
sed -i -re 's/([a-z]{2}\.)?archive.ubuntu.com|security.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g' Ubuntu.mirrors

sudo ./wily

Upon running this on another host I got "ImportError: No module named 'apt' just install it:

Either:

apt-get install python-apt -y

sudo apt-get install python3-apt --reinstall <- This worked for me.

Gets a bunch of 404's and then asks if it should overwrite the sources.list Y

Try not to kill ssh if you're connected via ssh... Wait patiently and hope everything works...

restart

Should be on 15.10

cd ~
mkdir 

cp ~/sources.list ~/sources-backup.list
cp /etc/apt/sources.list ~/sources.list

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo do-release-upgrade

go through the upgrade, hope everything works...

Things are going to be removed, I just removed them all, I'll add back whatever I need later

restart the server again

should be on 16.04.3

sudo apt-get autoremove

My vps provider offered 15.04 as the most modern version of ubuntu. I couldn't load my own iso so I had to find a way to get up to date on ubuntu. I hope this will help someone else in the future.

THANKS! I really needed this, you save me haha.

I hope this will help someone else in the future.

Yes, without any doubts 👍

Thank you very much! I believed that there must be a way to do this! It is so sad that other resources including Ubuntu-related forums can suggest only fresh install of a new/supported release which is not always suitable.

Thanks very much for making this available. Your workaround for 15.04 -> 15.10 beat out all the other guides and resources on the Internet due to the timelapse and 15.04 being EOL. Like you, my hosting provider doesn't install anything newer than 15.04. With your guide, I was able to get to 15.10 and the upgrade to 16.04 is now underway. Again, thanks very much for sharing your workaround!

Hi, thank you so much. It is great. I did 15.04 -> 15.10 , but as I have just the command line access the "sudo ./wily" doesn't work since I have not GUI. Do you have any recommendation?
Best.

I was getting the same issue when connected via SSH. You can either install x11vnc, start vnc via ssh, then remote in that way; or install xrdp, then remote in from windows remote desktop, or remmina from another linux machine. Hopefully that helps.

Upgrade from 15.04 to 15.10 worked as expected, going from 15.10 to 16.04 was good too.

This worked perfectly for me! Saved me a couple hours of driving, re-installing, and re-setting up software. Good stuff!
Lesson learned, always use the LTS releases for servers, don't leave your stuff unpatched for too long.

It was really helpful.
Can you explain some of the lines .

@ChandanKumarSahu
First line you're backing up your package lists (in case something goes wrong and you want to go back to using them)
Second line swaps out all the instances of archive.ubuntu.com and security.ubuntu.com with the old-releases.ubuntu.com inside of your package lists.
Third line updates and upgrades

Then you're grabbing wily which is I believe the upgrade scripts' name, and then uncompressing it.
Next we switch wilys' references to ubuntus update servers to the old releases server like we did on line 2.

And then we execute wily.
If I remember correctly, it 404's because it has the archive and security package lists cached somewhere, and then it asks if it should update those lists. (Again, if I'm remembering correctly)

Finally, it's done. And I think it asks if we want to restart. Which, of course we do. If it doesn't ask you can just run sudo shutdown -r now

We boot into 15.10.

Once again I backup my package lists ~ better safe than sorry.

We update the package list and then upgrade the installed packages. At the time of writing there was an upgrade path from 15.10->16.04 have an upgrade path to 16.04. So we can do it the proper way through the dist-upgrade command. However, eventually that upgrade path will be archived like from 15.04->15.10 and the automatic upgrade won't work. But hopefully this'll be helpful enough to help that person figure out what they've got to do in order to get to the next version of ubuntu.

I get the error where I upgrade my Ubuntu 15.04 to 15.10, the picture show "package sign error", but I don't kown how to resole it

@zhangjl I'm not sure how to fix that problem, if you're wanting to restore your package lists to how they were you can always revert them by copying them back sudo cp ~/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list but I don't think that'd fix the package signatures. If it were me, since it looks like it's only two packages, I'd just re-install them after the install was successful.

Thank you for the script! Today I managed to update an old VPS still stuck in 15.04 (ridiculous!).
A piece of advice: if there are active third-party source lists that may not be able to connect due to expired certificates, it would be better to disable them so as not to give errors during the version upgrade process.