upgrading old releases

[Jeffrey Walton]

On Wed, Nov 16, 2022 at 3:01 PM Jared Greenwald
<greenwaldjared at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Does anyone know of a way to perform a do-release-upgrade on an older (unsupported) install?  I imagine at some point in the past it was supported to upgrade from 18.10 to 19.04 and from there to a much newer version.  I've seen articles outlining a way to override the cache file but it looks like the do-release-upgrade code has overridden that but just dropping the cache in as a tarball instead of downloading it directly.  Does anyone know of a way around this?

I'm not sure I parsed the problem properly. My apologies if this
misses the mark.

The packages for the older Ubuntu releases can be found at
archive.ubuntu.com. If you have an old version you can usually use
archive.ubuntu.com in /etc/apt/sources.list.

If the release you are moving to is also old, then you can use sed to
change sources.list. In this case, you change the URL and the release
Codename (like bionic to disco). Then, apt-get update && apt-get
upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade should do the work for you.

I've used archive.ubuntu.com to update Ubuntu 4, which I keep around
for testing.

Jeff