Perhaps I should pay more attention to those ‘end of life’ notices that linux distributions put out. One of my home servers (Ergo) has been happily running Ubuntu 7.04 (codename feisty) which is old and now unsupported. Athough I’m of the “if it ain’t broke…” school of thought, it was time to get the server upgraded to a supported version.

The release upgrade is to version 7.10 (gutsy) but since 7.04 no longer exists in the standard archives the automatic upgrade process wasn’t going to work. With a lot of internet help the process that worked for me was:-

• backup!!!
• edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change references to gb.archive.ubuntu.com to old-releases.ubuntu.com
• apt-get update : at this point we have a nice upto date 7.04 system.
• do-release-upgrade : this fails, but creates a directory in /tmp edit /etc/apt/sources.list back to using the proper archives i.e. gb.archive.ubuntu.com and referring to gutsy not feisty
• in the created /tmp directory restart the failed upgrade with:- >./gutsy –frontend DistUpgradeViewText –mode=server

The upgrade then proceeds as normal, resulting in a 7.10 system. Yes, an unbelievably messy and techi process but I’d defy anyone to upgrade lets say a windows 95 machine to XP automatically across the internet for free while keeping your files and settings. Now the server is on a supported version number this process won’t be needed again. Mind you since 7.10 is itself old and due for EOL (end of life) in April 2009 I guess I’d better get round to a general upgrade cycle.