Question

Updating Ubuntu 16.04 to 20.04

Is there, anywhere on the internet, a reliable step-by-step guide on how to upgrade from Ubuntu 16.04 to 20.04? Apparently it has to be done via 18.04. I have updated the current 16.04 system by:

  • sudo ufw allow 1022/tcp

  • sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

After this i get the message: The following packages have been kept back: cloud-init

I guess that is why the system upgrade fails:

  • sudo do-release-upgrade

gives the message: Please install all available updates for your release before upgrading.

Thanks for any help! David

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Geoff Maddock • January 22, 2022

I’m working on this same process right now. I ran into the same issue with cloud-init. After installing it, I was able to get back pm track and update from 16.04 to 18.04 successfully.

My only issue at that point was disabling apache2.

Then I did the same process to connect to 20.04 and while it worked, I was unable to connect to my droplet any more and couldn’t figure out what was happening.

Janusz Szeligowski • November 19, 2020

Hi,

@DavidKo wrote
 I don’t find any useful information that explains if upgrading via 18.04 means...

You need to do an upgrade in two steps

  • from 16.04 to 18.04
  • from 18.04 to 20.04

Each time you do that with a command

sudo do-release-upgrade

@DavidKo wrote
After this i get the message:
The following packages have been kept back:
cloud-init

I guess that is why the system upgrade fails

That is probably the cause of the failure. You could try to do some steps to fix it but before doing anything I recommend making a snapshot of the droplet. You could try to (re)install the package that has been kept back.

sudo apt install cloud-init

You may get the questions about replacing packages with the new ones during the installation. Agree to that.

Let me know if it works, pls.

David Kornfeld • November 10, 2020

Edit: I don’t find any useful information that explains if upgrading via 18.04 means:

  • the upgrade process will do this by itself in two steps
  • I need to specify 18.04 in the command since otherwise it will try to go straight to 20.04
  • I need to do the upgrade twice; first the upgrade command will upgrade to 18.04. Then I will have to run the upgrade again and it will install 20.04

//David