Ubuntu 7.04 (Fiesty Fawn) has been end of life for sometime now. Unfortunately we didn’t do an upgrade at work prior to that time. Now that we are virtualizing the entire colo infrastructure, we can leverage vmware snapshots and our existing maintenance windows to perform the upgrades.
Ubuntu provides upgrade paths for the previous version to LTS and from previous LTS release to the current LTS release. Since 7.10 was in place between 7.04 and 8.04, there was now way to go from 7.04 using the existing repositories. Luckily the nice folks at Ubuntu provide http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
The procedure to do the upgrade is as follows:
Download the gutsy upgrade tarball from the gutsy repository on old-releases (http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/gutsy/main/dist-upgrader-all/current/gutsy.tar.gz) and untar it into a temp directory.
cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.fiesty
sed s/archive.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g /etc/apt/sources.list > 1
sed s/security.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g 1 > 2
sed s/fiesty/gutsy/g 2 > /etc/apt/sources.list
rm 1 2
mkdir /tmp/gutsyUG
cd /tmp/gutsyUG
wget -O /tmp/gutsy.tar.gz http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/gutsy/main/dist-upgrader-all/current/gutsy.tar.gz
tar -xzvf ../gutsy.tar.gz
You need to edit the prerequists-sources.list file to use old-releases and not us.archive. Replace the only uncommented line in that file with:
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty-backports main/debian-installer
Now you can run the upgrade command:
./gutsy --frontend DistUpgradeViewText --mode=server
This will upgrade you from 7.04 to 7.10. Once you are running 7.10, you need to upgrade again to 8.04.
sed s/fiesty/hardy/g /etc/apt/sources.list.fiesty > /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
do-release-upgrade
All along the way it will prompt you if you want to keep your config files. I'd recommend keeping the defaults. Quite a bit changed from 7.04 to 8.04 in how ldap auth works. It will be interesting to see how my systems upgrade.
Note: This process has only been proofed in concept not rigiorusly tested in the field. Your mileage may vary.
Ubuntu has some community docs on EOL Upgrades here that may be useful.
Thank you. This was extremely helpful upgrading from 7.10 to 8.04 — I couldn’t find any other way to get package lists.
You saved me with this. Thank you.