On Sun, 23 Feb 2014, tclug at freakzilla.com wrote: > Just want to point out that you CAN skip versions with Ubuntu. Probably > not unlimited version skips, but I just went from 12.04 to 13.10 on a > couple of machines in one go. That's good news, but how do you do it? The update-manager doesn't offer any options of which version to upgrade to, as far as I can tell. I looked at "man do-release-upgrade" and saw the "-d" option: -d, --devel-release Check if upgrading to the latest devel release is possible I ran that on three machines. On one is running Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS and it reported downloading trusty.tar.gz, which would be Ubuntu 14.04. That makes sense because 14.04 would be the next avaiable LTS, but I think it's still in alpha. Another was running Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick), but it failed while trying to download natty.tar.gz, which would be Ubuntu 11.04: Checking for a new ubuntu release Err Upgrade tool signature 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.91.14 80] Err Upgrade tool 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.91.14 80] Fetched 0B in 0s (0B/s) WARNING:root:file 'natty.tar.gz.gpg' missing Failed to fetch Fetching the upgrade failed. There may be a network problem. There is no network problem, at least not on my end. Maybe there's someplace that I can get the .gpg file, and then maybe it will work. A third machine was running Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) and it downloaded lucid.tar.gz, which would be Ubuntu 10.04 So it seems like the -d option is not causing Ubuntu to find "the latest devel release" but only the next devel release. > Now if you're going to do a reinstall, well, this is why we keep /home > and /usr/local etc on separate partitions (: You can reinstall the OS > and keep all your data and configuration. That sounds like a reasonable idea, but I haven't been doing that. It isn't too big of a deal to copy from backup, though. Mike