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D.Zou
Asked: 2014-08-02 05:41:37 +0800 CST

upgrade to 13.04 from 12.10 without quantal repo [duplicate]

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I have recently been made a temporary owner of an old 12.10 Ubuntu machine so I can upgrade it to the latest(14.04). So I am trying to upgrade to the 13.04 as per ubuntu website, and from there to 14.04, but I seemed to have run into the apt-get bug:

root@camolls1000774583:/etc/apt# do-release-upgrade 
Checking for a new Ubuntu release
Your Ubuntu release is not supported anymore.
For upgrade information, please visit:
http://www.ubuntu.com/releaseendoflife

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/do-release-upgrade", line 145, in <module>
fetcher.run_options += ["--mode=%s" % options.mode,
AttributeError: type object 'DistUpgradeFetcherCore' has no attribute 'run_options'

I googled around, apparently the fix was pushed in a upgrade and was placed in quantal repo.

But when I tried to run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade all my quantal repos came back as 404 not found or ignored. I am guessing since Quantal is EOL they took away the repo.

So how do I upgrade to Raring without quantal repo?

I have also attached a copy of my sources.list in case that helps. I can't nuke it. I need the user's data intact.

thanks

Edited for additional clarification.

12.10

1 Answers

  1. For the most part you can get away with changing all the references of the old release to the new release (ie: "quantal" to "trusty" for example) in /etc/apt/sources.list (and any .list files under /etc/apt/sources.list.d/), run an apt-get update and then an apt-get dist-upgrade - I've seen very few installations "break" using this hackish method.

    But the best way is to ensure that /home is on its own partition or volume, allowing you to easily upgrade or completely reinstall Ubuntu without impacting on personal data because you tell the installer you mount the partition/volume as /home but not to format it.

    If the system in question has not got /home separate, then grab a USB HDD, backup the entire /home folder structure to it with rsync -avz /home /path/to/usb/hdd --progress, then reformat and reinstall with a proper partitioning setup (eg: 20GB for root "/", 4GB for "swap" and the remainder of the drive for home "/home"), then restore the contents of /home from the USB HDD, change owner ID's on all files and folders if necessary with a big chown -R username: /home/username command and then pat yourself on the back.

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