Ubuntu sources problems

[David Fox]

On Sun, Aug 31, 2008 at 7:21 PM, Ashley Benton <chuaukantli at gmail.com> wrote:
> That was the first thing that I tried by opening the update manager. It
> doesn't work (Authentificating the upgrade failed. There may be a problem

According to the manpage for update-manager, it should be able to
substitute the correct sources and plug them into your existing
sources file, as it claims to do this as one of the tasks.

However, according to this page[1] it doesn't seem to be possible t
upgrade from 6.10 directly through to 8.04, because 6.10 isn't an LTS
release.

[1] http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading

If this is the case, and if the sources files for 6.10 are at least
physically stored at the same locations as the newer versions, you
could then open an editor and do a global replace to the next later
version (7.04), dist-upgrade from there, then change those source to
7.10, update again, and then finally go change those references to
8.04 ones.

But that's a lot of upgrading, and depending on what kind of a
connection you have, installing from the latest cd may be preferable.
It also depends on how many packages you've installed after you did
the initial install of 6.10.

The file to change is in /etc/apt -it's called sources.list. If you
open that in an editor you should see a bunch of references to (I
think) dapper or maybe edgy. That's the code word for that
distribution. You'll want to at first change all the references for
edgy to feisty, save the file, and do an aptiude update followed by an
aptitude dist-upgrade. (This assumes of course that the locations are
at the same place, and I'm not sure of this because I have not been
running Ubuntu long.

A simple and fast way to do the replace would be to;

open a terminal

$ sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list

ESC then type in :%s/edgy/feisty/g

:wq to save and write the file. Then you can do the upgrade.

If that works, then repeat the same procedure to go from feisty to
gutsy and then finally hardy.

But perhaps update-manager is the preferable way of doing this because
the sources files vary a bit between releases, I think.