How To Upgrade Ubuntu To 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish

Objective

Upgrade an existing Ubuntu installation 18.04 LTS to 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish

Requirements

You need an existing Ubuntu 18.04 LTS install with root privileges. The following link will provide you with an information on how to upgrade your current Ubuntu system to 18.04 LTS.

Difficulty

Easy

Conventions

  • # – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command
  • $ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user

Release Date

The Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish is expected to be releases in mid October 2018.

What’s New

Current, the most prominent new features to be expected for Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish are:

  • GNOME 3.30
  • New default Communitheme theme
  • Faster boot with new compression algorithms
Note also that you can check your Ubuntu version following our guide on this topic: How to check Ubuntu version

Preparations

At this time your are only able to upgrade to Ubuntu 18.10 Development Branch. Upgrades to a final release will not be available until few days after the official Ubuntu 18.10 release date.

Before you trigger the upgrade make sure that you are already using the latest Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver and that it is fully updated.

$ sudo apt update 
$ sudo apt upgrade
$ sudo apt dist-upgrade

Remove all no longer required packages:

$ sudo apt autoremove


Upgrade to Ubuntu 18.10 procedure

Begin upgrade to 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish

First, open and edit /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades file and set Prompt=normal to avoid No new release found message. Save the file.

start upgrade

Begin the upgrade process with the following command and say y when prompted:

NOTE
Upgrades from 18.04 may not be enabled until a few days after 18.10’s release day, unless using the -d option.
$ sudo do-release-upgrade

If upgrading before the official 18.10 release date or while the upgrade from 18.04 is still not available use -d to perform upgrade:

$ sudo do-release-upgrade -d

remove unwanted packages

Some packages may no longer be required. Answer y to confirm their removal.



Finish the upgrade to 18.10 by restart

Enter y to restart your system.

Your Ubuntu 18.04 is now upgraded to Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish

Your Ubuntu 18.04 is now upgraded to Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish

How to Upgrade Ubuntu The Debian Way

Change Your Sources

If you’ve selected the traditional Debian path, you’re going to need to change the /etc/apt/sources.list file and replace the name of your previous release with cosmic. If you currently run 17.10, first perform upgrade to 18.04 before attempting to upgrade to 18.10 release. Once, if you’re on 18.04, replace every instance of bionic with cosmic.

This process can be automated by using the following sed command:

UPGRADE FROM 18.04 TO 18.10
$ sudo sed -i 's/bionic/cosmic/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
Update Ubuntu 18.04 repositories to point to Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic

Update Ubuntu 18.04 repositories to point to Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic

Then, look in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/. Change any files in there the same way. If you end up getting an error when you try to update Ubuntu, use artful until those repositories are updated.

Ubuntu Update and Ubuntu Upgrade

Now, you can run the Ubuntu dist upgrade. First, update the Apt sources. Then, run the Ubuntu upgrade.

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt -y dist-upgrade
Your Ubuntu 18.04 is now upgraded to Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish

Your Ubuntu 18.04 is now upgraded to Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish

The upgrade should take a bit of time. Chances are, every package on the system will be upgraded. When the Ubuntu upgrade does finish, reboot the system. When the system comes back up, you’ll be running Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish!