[Bug 1811203] Re: upgrade from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 failed

[Bruce Adams]

A lot of people seem to have similar issues. I think the root cause is that the error message is not clear enough about what the actual problem is and what you can do to resolve it. The information is out there with sufficient googling but it could be more obvious.
Even having fixed the problem I'm not certain what the exact problem was and which of the steps I took were required to fix it.

** Summary changed:

- upgrade from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 failed
+ improve diagnostics and advice for "could not determine the upgrade" errors.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1811203

Title:
  improve diagnostics and advice for "could not determine the upgrade"
  errors.

Status in ubuntu-release-upgrader package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid

Bug description:
  The upload GUI said a new version was available and would I like to
  upgrade. I clicked yes and it went off and tried to do its thing but
  failed with:

  "Could not determine the upgrade

  An unresolvable problem occurred while calculating the upgrade.

   This can be caused by:
   * Upgrading to a pre-release version of Ubuntu
   * Running the current pre-release version of Ubuntu
   * Unofficial software packages not provided by Ubuntu

  If none of this applies, then please report this bug using the command
  'ubuntu-bug ubuntu-release-upgrader-core' in a terminal."

  So I ran the requested command and ended up here...

  Now I do have some third party channels in /etc/apt/sources.list.d
  but there is no information in the GUI telling me what went wrong.

  I tried upgrading from the command line with:

  sudo apt-get upgrade
  sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

  Both of these seem to think I am already up to date.

  "0 to upgrade, 0 to newly install, 0 to remove and 0 not to upgrade."

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04
  Package: ubuntu-release-upgrader-core 1:16.04.26
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.4.0-141.167-generic 4.4.162
  Uname: Linux 4.4.0-141-generic x86_64
  ApportVersion: 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.18
  Architecture: amd64
  CrashDB: ubuntu
  CurrentDesktop: GNOME-Classic:GNOME
  Date: Thu Jan 10 07:34:04 2019
  PackageArchitecture: all
  SourcePackage: ubuntu-release-upgrader
  UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to xenial on 2019-01-10 (0 days ago)
  VarLogDistupgradeTermlog:

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