Distribution upgrades

This page provides some advice and guidelines on how to upgrade distributions on servers.

First of all, decide whether you want to do a dist-upgrade or rather a reinstallation. Reinstallation is a better option where feasible, as the result is a more consistent system. Any system that is setup and configured completely automatically (e.g. using Puppet) should generally be reinstalled rather than upgraded.

Please only follow the supported Ubuntu upgrade paths, i.e. only upgrade between adjacent releases, or from one LTS release to the next.

Distribution upgrades should be done using

# do-release-upgrade -p

...after first upgrading all packages before you start.

Things to be aware of

• do-release-upgrade will disable the Wikimedia APT repository, as it's unknown. This should be put back immediately after the upgrade, with the proper distribution name of course (.e.g. "wikimedia-lucid")