Trying to upgrade with do-release-upgrade failing

[Liam Proven]

On Tue, 23 Jun 2020 at 00:31, Mike Marchywka <marchywka at hotmail.com> wrote:

>  Is installing from that likely to be the simplest thing? I'd like to do this over
> ssh as the machine not easy to get at right now.

*Reads*
*Rereads*
*Emits surprised bark of laughter*

You want to try a remote upgrade from an unsupported (non-LTS) version
from NINE YEARS AGO? :-o

Holy fsck. I say fsck because you'll be doing a lot of them. Wow.

Er, probably not. I mean, you can try, but you will need to upgrade it
to 2 LTS releases that are already out of support and have been moved
to archive status. This is not easy. None of the scripts will work;
you'll have to edit them manually.

Offhand, I'd say no. The do-release-upgrade process fetches stuff from
repositories that are not there any more, so it won't work. Trying to
fix it manually sounds scary and complicated to me, and I would be
reluctant if I were in front of the box. Remotely, I would not even
try.

What _might_ work...

[1] sudo dpkg-query -l > pkglist.txt -- to get a list of installed stuff

[2] installing right over the top -- in theory this leaves /home and
some settings and things alone, deletes the rest and installs a new
distro in place.

[3] Massaging your package list from step 1 and getting it to
reinstall all those packages

But you'd probably still have a ton of config to re-apply...


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