Upgrading to 11.04 - Desktop

[Tom H]

On Sat, Apr 30, 2011 at 11:46 AM, Peter Hillier-Brook
<phb at hbsys.plus.com> wrote:
>
> Well, I decided to upgrade a test machine to 11.04 to see what all the fuss
> was about with unity and fell at the first hurdle. Using Update Manager it
> produced a message stating "Could not download release notes". This is
> consistent across several machines, suggesting a faulty URL somewhere.
>
> A second attempt with do-release-upgrade produced "Checking for a new ubuntu
> release" and then nothing for more than the 15 minutes that my patience
> lasted.

I had the same problem when upgrading from 10.10 to a beta of 11.04.
do-release-upgrade stalled and after about 15 minutes, I ctrl-c'd out
of it and decided the use the Debian, ***non-approved*** (the "***"
are for the Ubuntu devotees not to reply endlessly that this isn't the
Ubuntu way) of using dist-upgrade.

I suspect that, if you've reached the same step as I did, sources.list
is already set up for natty. But I'd check it for any on-standard
repositories like backports.

The preliminary steps (that I can think of off-hand) would be to clean
out previously downloaded packages (with either "apt-get clean" or
deleting the files in "/var/cache/apt/archives/" and
"/var/cache/apt/archives/partial/"), to check whether there are badly
installed packages ("dpkg --audit"), to check whether you have
packages on hold ("aptitude search '?action(hold)'") before running
"apt-get upgrade" and "apt-get dist-upgrade".

(You could also try running "do-release-upgrade" a second time...)