Upgrading to Non-Current Distribution

[Avi Greenbury]

Kenneth Jacker wrote:
> Thanks for your prompt reply!
> 
>   cl> You will have to do this in two stages, to 11.10 then to 12.04.
>   cl> Update Manager should give you the option of going to 11.10, then it
>   cl> will give you the further option when that is complete.
> 
> Note that I will most likely be doing all of this from the "command
> line", not the GUI 'Update Manager'.  Guess I'll use something like
> "apt-get upgrade".

You'll use 
  sudo do-release-upgrade

Historically, editing your sources.list to refer to the new version
and then running

  sudo apt-get dist-upgrade 

was the way to do this (and it still is in Debian), but some Ubuntu
packages rely on bits of do-release-upgrade to take care of changes
between major versions that dist-upgrade doesn't take care of.

> But won't that go directly to the latest distribution.  Here's what the
> 'apt-get' "man page" says:
> 
>        "'upgrade' is used to install the newest versions 
>         of all packages currently installed ..."
> 
> Wouldn't "newest versions" be the 12.10 files/packages?

No, that's perhaps ambiguous wording there. It's the latest versions
of the packages about which apt is aware. Apt's awareness of a package
comes from it downloading the list of available ones with an apt-get
update.
This downloads indexes from those repositories defined in
/etc/apt/sources.list and your sources.list is currently configured to
use 11.10's repositories, so your apt is only currently aware of those
packages available for 11.10.

Generally, during a release, no major version changes will happen.
Security patches are applied, but that's it - if 11.10 shipped with
version 2.0.1 of something, the latest possible version of that come
the end of support for 11.10 will generally be 2.0.1. To get 2.0.2 (or
later), you would normally need to upgrade to 12.04.

-- 
Avi