Headless Ubuntu (Server) distribution upgrade

Posted by Wim on October 28, 2012

Information about how to upgrade Ubuntu from the command line.

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Doing a distribution upgrade is easy in the graphical user interface. On a “headless” Ubuntu Server, you probably don’t have a graphical user interface available, and you need to perform a few easy steps.

First you need to check 2 things:

  • The package update-manager-core needs to be installed. Just run the following command: (it will install it, if it is not already)

    sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

  • On Ubuntu Server, the update channel is usually “LTS” (Long Time Support) which will upgrade only to the major release of Ubuntu Server. Probably, you want to set this to “normal”, to allow an upgrade to every distribution upgrade.

    To do this, open the file /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades, and change the line Prompt=lts to Prompt=normal.

    For example, with nano:

    sudo pico /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades

    Change the Prompt setting to “normal”. Press Ctrl-X, press Y to confirm and press enter to confirm the filename.

Then the distribution upgrade can be started by running this command:

sudo do-release-upgrade -d

It is not recommended to do a distribution upgrade remotely over ssh. The do-release-upgrade command above checks on this, and gives a warning. However, I didn’t have any problem doing the upgrade remotely over ssh.