Are there alternatives after the official support time stops?

I'm currently running Ubuntu 8.10 on a system. It works very good but I did a lot of tuning (it's a server) to get it working. I'm aware that I need to upgrade to a new LTS version of Ubuntu if I have time.

But until I have time for that, are there alternative ways to get some (albeit unofficial) security updates from a secondary source?

Solution 1:

I don't imagine you will find a repository that continues supplying security updates after a release has reached its "end of life." It's just too much work for something that has no future.

That said, even after the official repository has been discontinued, you can still access the old repo for the purpose of installing new programs, ect... Also, this can be important for when you find time to do the upgrade as you should make sure that all of your packages have been correctly updated to the release’s final versions before doing the upgrade. I'm not sure, but the do-release-upgrade script might very well choke if it can not find the repository for the release that you are upgrading from.

After "end of life," the repositories are mirrored at old-releases.ubuntu.com. So you should change your your sources.list to look for:

deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid-backports main restricted universe multiverse