do-upgrade-release

May 11^th2020

I was upgrading my server to ubuntu 20.04 when I came across the issue where

sudo do-upgrade-release

failed. Based off stackoverflow and other people's experiences, the command is either magic and works like a charm or it's pretty broken.

The solution I ended up doing was changing my sources list, which is found at:

/etc/apt/sources.list

The problem was that do-upgrade-release was not updating the sources list, so it couldn't find any of 20.04's packages. If you do

sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list 

Then all of the lines are formatted like

# 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

Change the codename from your old OS to your new OS. In my case, I had to change it to focal for focal fossa.

This is apparently the "hacky," "Debian" way to do it that Ubuntu has been trying to avoid doing. However, sometimes stuff just doesn't work.

Other solutions I've seen are to run

apt dist-upgrade

But I've never used that and can't verify that it works.