This April will bring us the brand-new Ubuntu LTS release!
It’s this time of year! Following six months of intense advancement, Ubuntu 20.04, codenamed Focal Fossa,has launched on the 23rd of April, 2020. It replaces Ubuntu 19.10 in the position of being the most recent stable version of the operating system.
Ubuntu 20.04 is an LTS (Long Long Term Support) release. This means that support for the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release is provided for five years i.e. until 2025. For non-Long-Term Support and Short-Term Support release, official support is offered up to 9 months. LTS release are made every two years.
Ubuntu 20.04 is a major update to a variety of features of the OS including speed of boot, bundle applications, and appearance. In this post, we will look at how we can update to Ubuntu 20.04 to ensure we can test the most recent features.
Command do-release-upgrade
do-release-upgrade is a command line program that allows you to update Ubuntu to the most recent available version. It’s a one-step that is easy to execute command, and the user does not need to take any backups of his current installed software.
To execute the command, open a terminal using CTRL + Alt + T or clicking the Terminal icon in the dock.
To upgrade to the latest Ubuntu release it is required that all software installed is up-to-date to the latest version. If it is not, use the following commands to upgrade it:
sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade
Then, type to do-release-upgrade within the terminal.
do-release-upgrade -d
Note the note the -d flag that is added to the command. This is because upgrading to the latest LTS is not available directly until July of the release of the LTS. Therefore, the Ubuntu 20.04 upgrade will be available until July of 2020. However, using the flag -d flag will force the user to upgrade to the most recent developmentrelease and also takes an LTS release to be an development release.
If you run this command in the months following July 2020, you are able to simply type:
do-release-upgrade
If you have third-party repositories that you have added to the sources.list file (list of repositories you can install/update software from) The upgrade process will require for you to proceed. Just press enter and allow the process to proceed, and you can add the third-party repositories after the upgrade process is completed.
Third party repositories are typically included in the installation of software that isn’t available in the official Ubuntu repositories. Eg. Skype, Google Chrome, etc.
After the upgrade tool has completed certain pre-processes it will produce a an overview of the modifications that will be made when the upgrade is completed. It will ask the user for to confirm the upgrade. Enter the Y then Enter to proceed with the upgrade. You can also type the character d to view the changes in greater detail and the list of packages that will be modified.
Press Q to return to the an earlier prompt to begin the upgrade.
When you press the Y after which the upgrade process will disable the lock screen, and then asks the user to enter Enter to proceed.
The process should go on until the end. The interruption of the upgrade between is not advised as it could cause a crash to the Ubuntu installation. Make sure that you connect to a source of power and have internet connection (around 1.5 gigabytes of information downloaded) to allow the upgrade to run uninterrupted.
Once the upgrade process is complete after which you can execute the command to lsb_release -a to determine whether Ubuntu is upgraded.
Reboot the system to test the new features available in Ubuntu 20.04!