Vindictive Vole

Ubuntu left me in the ditch today, pretending it couldn't see any of the repositories because, it said, I'd fallen too far behind with upgrades.

This page got me back on the road in terms of updating 14.10.

But further action was needed to get it to try and upgrade to 15.04 - I had to manually edit /etc/apt/sources.list so that it also had entries pointing to old-releases for utopic (14.10) and also entries pointing to archive for vivid (15.04). After doing this, apt-get -dist-upgrade actually started doing an upgrade instead of pretending it couldn't see any of the repositories.

Like so many other things about Linux, this is hard to understand because there are about 4 different GUI-based ways of editing the same data, none of which actually allow you to make the settings you need. If you've been fiddling with GUIs for more than 10 minutes, and the problem isn't fixed yet, you're going to have to edit some text file somewhere instead.

Updated to say: the word on the street now is that you shouldn't be mixing versions in sources.list - you should be using do-release-upgrade. But be sure btw to change references to archive, security and extras to old-releases - despite the name, extras does seem to be essential.