Upgrade from Yakkety Yak (Ubuntu 16.10) when its End of Life [duplicate]

I have a yakkety system running and would like to do a dist upgrade.

I followed the procedure at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EOLUpgrades however, it did not help.

Apparently, some files are not found. It looks like the packages at http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/yakkety (and all the other directories) are not available.

Is there a new procedure to upgrade or a manual way to force the system to simply do an upgrade? I basically do not care whether I have to do two upgrades first to zesty and then to artful or to artful directly. However, currently I only have the choice to go to artful directly.

Solution 1:

It seems crazy, but it's true that you can't upgrade from a release that's only 15 months old, for the simple reason that upgrade from 16.10 to 17.10 isn't supported, and 17.04 is EOL, so that upgrade isn't offered. I hope the developers see the folly at some stage too, but in the mean time...

Follow the instructions at EOLUpgrades up to the point before you run do-release-upgrade, BUT as muru says, use the normal xx.archive.ubuntu.com rather than old-releases.ubuntu.com. Then, you need to edit the file /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/UpdateManager/Core/MetaRelease.py - around lines 294/295 there are two lines which read:

if not dist.supported and not self.useDevelopmentRelease:
            continue

Comment those two lines out by adding hashes at the start. Then run do-release-upgrade, which will now upgrade to zesty rather than artful ( so you'll have to do the whole thing again to go to artful. )

Obviously since Zesty is also not supported, if you run into issues with the upgrade you're pretty much on your own... though I'm guessing many have trodden the path between 16.10 and 17.04 in the past so Google may well help...