Ubuntu provides new version in every 6 months like 16.04 , 16.10, 17.04 etc. We can install latest upgrades easily with do-release-upgrade  command. In this tutorial we will examine a simple release upgrade operation. There is no version specific difference during the upgrade.

Start Upgrade Process with do-release-upgrade

We will start the upgrade process with do-release-upgrade  command. We will provide sudo  because of root privilege requirements.  This command will setup basic configuration before real upgrade.

$ sudo do-release-upgrade

After some basic checks like new distribution packages and compability it will prompt for continuation.

Change Ssh Port

As ssh is the management protocol it is important during upgrade. ssh packages will be upgraded too and the service will be restart. So in order to prevent problems additional ssh service will be start at port 1022

Third Party Repositories

It provides us some information about third party repositories because they may create problems during installation. So they are disabled but easily enabled after upgrade process is completed.

Start Upgrade

Now everything seems ready. So we can start the package download and upgrade operation. But before we will see that information like new packages, downloaded file sizes, download time etc. But also warns that the download can take several hours.

Reboot For Fresh Distrubution

We can  start using upgraded version but I prefer to restart the Linux system in order to start freshly. We will use reboot command with root privileges like below.

$ sudo reboot