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Accepted
Dan
Asked: 2015-10-29 05:00:56 +0800 CST

How to get the list of the unsupported packages mentioned during the OS upgrade?

  • 772

While running sudo do-release-upgrade, I got a message saying:

16 installed packages are no longer supported by Canonical. You can still get support from the community.

I know I probably shouldn't be worried, but how can I get a list of those packages before starting the upgrade?

The following is the complete output of do-release-upgrade before choosing continue: http://paste.ubuntu.com/12990830/

For better convenience, this is the most important part of it: 

Calculating the changes

Do you want to start the upgrade? 


16 installed packages are no longer supported by Canonical. You can 
still get support from the community. 

61 packages are going to be removed. 204 new packages are going to be 
installed. 1617 packages are going to be upgraded. 

You have to download a total of 1,220 M. This download will take 
about 55 minutes with your connection. 

Installing the upgrade can take several hours. Once the download has 
finished, the process cannot be canceled. 

 Continue [yN]  Details [d]
upgrade

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    • The first option: Press D to see the details after starting sudo do-release-upgrade as you can see it in the output of the command in your question.

    • The second option: Use /var/log/dist-upgrade/main.log

      awk -F\' '/demoted/ {gsub(/ /,"\n",$2); print $2}' /var/log/dist-upgrade/main.log

      to see something like this

      dvipng
gir1.2-vte-2.90
gnome-icon-theme-symbolic
libart2.0-cil
libgconf2-4
libgconf2.0-cil
libgnome-vfs2.0-cil
libgnome2.24-cil
libvte-2.90-9
monodoc-manual
obex-data-server
python-commandnotfound
rhythmbox-mozilla

    • The third option: You can see a list of the installed community packages with this command

      aptitude search '~i ~suniverse' -F "%p"

      to see something like this

      adwaitaicon-theme-full
aglfn
aha                                                                           
android-tools-adb                                                                  
android-tools-fastboot
anjuta
anjuta-common
apt-file
[…snip…]
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  2. When you drop out of the do-release-upgrade script, whether you select N or y, the log will be saved in /var/log/dist-upgrade/main.log.

    Getting the list of unsupported packages is a matter of running the following command:

    grep 'demoted' /var/log/dist-upgrade/main.log

    you would get an output similar to:

    2015-10-28 18:14:01,540 DEBUG demoted: 'gir1.2-vte-2.90 gnome-icon-theme gnome-icon-theme-symbolic gstreamer0.10-plugins-base-apps libpocketsphinx1 libsphinxbase1 libunityvoice1 libvte-2.90-9 libvte-2.90-common obex-data-server python-commandnotfound rhythmbox-mozilla sphinx-voxforge-hmm-en sphinx-voxforge-lm-en ubuntu-wallpapers-vivid unity-voice-service'
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  3. I believe the easiest and most direct way to do this is with this command (as of Ubuntu 20.04):

    ubuntu-security-status --unavailable

    This will give you an output like this:

    1734 packages installed, of which:
  13 packages are no longer available for download
dvipng gir1.2-vte-2.90 gnome-icon-theme-symbolic libart2.0-cil 
 libgconf2-4 libgconf2.0-cil libgnome-vfs2.0-cil libgnome2.24-cil 
 libvte-2.90-9 monodoc-manual obex-data-server python-commandnotfound 
 rhythmbox-mozilla

Packages that are not available for download may be left over from a
previous release of Ubuntu, may have been installed directly from a
.deb file, or are from a source which has been disabled.

Run 'apt-cache show dvipng' to learn more about that package.
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