Wednesday, January 11, 2017

How to install software or upgrade from an old unsupported release?


Recently I have installed an older version of Ubuntu on my old machine. Whenever I try to install any software, I get an error saying it couldn't be found:


$ sudo apt-get install vlc
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Couldn't find package vlc


The repositories for older releases that are not supported (like 11.04, 11.10 and 13.04) get moved to an archive server. There are repositories available at http://old-releases.ubuntu.com.


The reason for this is that it is now out of support and no longer receiving updates and security patches.


I would urge you to consider a supported distribution. If your computer is too old in terms of memory or processor then you should consider a distribution such as Lubuntu or Xubuntu.


If you want to continue using an outdated release then edit /etc/apt/sources.list and change archive.ubuntu.com and security.ubuntu.com to old-releases.ubuntu.com.


You can do this with sed:


sudo sed -i -re 's/([a-z]{2}\.)?archive.ubuntu.com|security.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

then update with:


sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Sometimes, it might be faster to create backups of your system and reinstall using supported release instead.


Source: Can I keep using Ubuntu 9.04 if it's outdated?




To upgrade to a new release:


Once you have performed the above steps to switch to the old-releases mirrors, update the Update Manager and then do do-release-upgrade:


sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install update-manager-core
sudo do-release-upgrade

See also EOLUpgrades - Community Help Wiki.


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