Howto: Upgrade Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server to 12.04 LTS Server

We have had a number of customers ask us about when a Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Server template will be available.

The bad news is that we’re still working on it, the good news is that you can perform an in-place upgrade from 10.04 to 12.04 quite easily. Here is how to do it:

1. Ensure all the latest updates have been applied to your Ubuntu 10.04 LTS instance by running:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Follow the on-screen instructions.

2. Install update-manager-core if it is not already installed:

sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

3. If and only if upgrading from an LTS release, then edit /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades and set Prompt=lts

4. Launch the upgrade tool:

do-release-upgrade

Follow the on-screen instructions.

Note that if you’re upgrading from 10.04 LTS, do-release-upgrade will complain “No new release found” until 12.04.1 is released. To force an upgrade, use the -d option. See Ask Ubuntu for more information.

If you are not upgrading from an LTS release, Prompt=lts in the release-upgrades configuration file will fail to find an upgrade, as it requires than both the original and the new releases be LTS. You can change to Prompt=lts after a successful upgrade if you wish to stick to LTS in future.