Upgrade from Ubuntu 9.04

You did upgrade using the upgrade manager, right, you didn't just change your sources.list and hope for the best?

Fair question to which you'll end up with a vague answer as I don't have the command history to look back since restoring the backup.

The tabs I had open for trying to do the upgrade instructed me to:

# Install update-manager-core 
sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

# update your installation of Ubuntu
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

# Launch the upgrade tool
sudo do-release-upgrade

That failed do to the sources issue, so I found this page on ubuntu.com which instructed me to do this after fixing the sources:

sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude safe-upgrade
sudo do-release-upgrade

It's possible, now that I recount that, that ll I had to do was fix the sources and then go through the first set of instructions but that did not occur to me at the time.

Have you done all of the fixes recommended by the Linode library article? There's a couple rough edges in there.

That library article is what I used, and it was fine (except for some broken mysql replication I had to set up again). IIRC it was pretty seamless. I had enough room in my container to duplicate my main disk image before starting and boot back into it just in case things went wrong.

But don't make the same mistake I did and go all the way to 10.10. I did not know what "LTS" meant until the day after I went to 10.10, LOL…guess I'll be doing this again sooner than I probably would like.

Not sure how I missed that one. I will have to try it. Thanks.