karniv0re's Journal: Upgrading Ubuntu End Of Life 13.04 Raring Ringtail on a Sony Vaio

I bought a laptop a couple years ago. I don't know why, because I installed Ubuntu on it and then it sat unused for about three years until my girlfriend's laptop broke and I told her she could use mine. Having a Linux machine is like having an HP graphing calculator that uses RPN â" Awesome for you, but when someone asks to borrow it, they are utterly clueless. All she really needs it for is Internet (all anyone really needs computers for these days is Internet â" hence Chromebooks). So she can get by, but the thing is still on Raring Ringtail, which I came to find out is 3 versions old and End of Lifed. Which means upgrading isn't a snap. So I'm taking some time out of my Saturday to do that and document it here.

I will also take a minute to mention how much I fucking hate Ubuntu and the monstrosity of a desktop environment, Unity. Fuck the whole thing straight to hell. I have probably uttered the phrase "Fucking Ubuntu..." more times than I can enumerate. Now, I would have installed Debian, but a couple years ago when they first started coming out with UEFI, Ubuntu was about the only distro that handled installs with ease. I'm sure Debian has caught up by now, but I'm not willing to spend a whole weekend on this. Half of a day is all it's getting.

So here we go.

I'm following along with Ubuntu's guide, but I'll repeat the steps here as we all know how links tend to disappear years down the line: https://help.ubuntu.com/commun... First of all, I didn't want to do everything with sudo, especially things I know I'm going to need to be doing as root, so I'm just going to

$ su -
Password:
su: Authentication failure

Goddamnit. Yet another thing to hate about Ubuntu. They treat their users like children (because most of their users are) and they don't even give them a root account. It's like the movies where the experienced guy gives the untrustworthy guy a gun but it's not loaded, and the idiot finds out later when he tries to shoot the experienced guy. Anyway, I'm an experienced guy, so I have to manually enable root.

$ sudo passwd root
Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully

Now we can proceed.

$ su -
Password:
#

Update /etc/apt/sources.list

# vim /etc/apt/sources.list

## EOL upgrade sources.list
# Required
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ CODENAME main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ CODENAME-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ CODENAME-security main restricted universe multiverse
 
# Optional
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ CODENAME-backports main restricted universe multiverse

# apt-get update

You should also make sure some meta-packages are installed so the upgrade can continue without problems. Update-manager From version 6.06 and up you will need to install the update-manager and update-manager-core packages.

# apt-get install update-manager-core update-manager

Kernel This part takes a while, as the headers are pretty weighty.

sudo apt-get install linux-image-generic linux-headers-generic

Run the upgrade And then this part really takes a while, as you know.

# apt-get update
# apt-get dist-upgrade
# do-release-upgrade

Then do it it again. And again. Until you're caught up. Ugh, this takes forever.