I am running 14.04 MATE on my test Lenovo Thinkpad T61. When I last used Ubuntu 10.10 years ago, upgrading to the next release used to be a simple thing. How do I do that now? I checked the box in Software Updater which shows “Notify Me of a New Ubuntu Version” but no upgrade shows up. The upgrade process for versions 10.10 and previous versions were always simple and painless. Thanks for any help offered.
This is guesswork as I can’t physically see your desktop, but here’s a try (the process should be straightforward):
-
Do System > Control Centre > Software & Updates then go to the Other Software tab and untick everything (i.e. all PPAs you have set up).
-
Go to the Updates tab and select For any new version against Notify me of a new Ubuntu version:
-
Do System > Administration > Software Updater and you should get the 15.04 update flagged.
-
Do the upgrade.
-
When everything is done, do Step 1 but ticking all the options again and run the Software Updater again, which should pick up all the packages in updated PPAs.
I suspect you might have For long-term support versions selected in Step 2, which means upgrades won’t be picked up until 16.04 LTS is out.
3 Likes
I think I should have said (how stupid of me) that I am on the 14.04 LTS. I want to update from 14.04.1 to 14.04.2. The Linux images and headers in Synaptic still show 14.04.1. Thanks.
Your referring to the kernel, which will remain 3.13 for the life of your install since you started with 14.04.1.
You may upgrade the kernel (HWE) manually with synaptic.
Unless you have reasons, I would recommend staying with the 3.13 kernel and long term support.
And last, it is still easy to do a point release 
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AptGet/Howto#Maintenance_commands
I’m not talking about changing the 3.13 kernel. The release still shows 14.04.1 in System Monitor > System. Yet 14.04.2 is available as of March 2015. Is that upgrade included in normal release updates or do I have to use the Terminal as you stated? I thought it would show up somewhere in the Update Manager menu but it doesn’t show anything. Thanks.
There is nothing special to do for a point release. It’s part of the standard update/upgrade process. The above command is the same command that package manager and synaptic would use.
My system monitor shows only 14.04 and no point release.
So lets verify it in terminal by first checking the kernel version.
uname -r
It should read kernel 3.13.0-57. and…
lsb_release -a
Will tell you what point release your running.
If you are not running the latest released, then we will need to troubleshoot this.
I assume you have rebooted your system.
If I do an upgrade to 14.10. is there any way to prevent Firefox and Thunderbird from being updated? I don’t like the new Firefox interface beginning with Firefox 29. I have locked the versions in 14.04 to Firefox 28 and Thunderbird 24. Will locking them prevent the 14.10 upgrade from updating them? Thanks.
14.10 has reached end of life.
I have not tried this, but a version upgrade tends to take control. So my guess would be no, it would upgrade, but this is a guess. Better to hear it from someone else.
As for FireFox, I also do not like the constant upgrades and have switched to FF ESR.
No, because the package updates are swept up with the distribution update.
There are no doubt complex manipulations with apt which could be used to revert to old versions, but a far easier workaround is to use Pale Moon (browser) and FossaMail (email) which were forked from Firefox and Thunderbird precisely for the situation you describe (i.e. those who prefer the pre-Australis user interfaces).
Edit: To my surprise there is a simple way of preventing a package from being upgraded. From the terminal:
sudo apt-mark hold <package_name>
keeps it frozen until you do
sudo apt-mark unhold <package_name>
(This assumes that the package was installed using sudo apt-get install <package_name>; also, I simply do not know whether the freeze would persist over a distribution update).