Like I said, I don't think it's an unlimited skip, and some versions might 
be better at it than others. I used do-release-upgrade -d, and it worked 
for me. Might not have worked as well in previous versions.

On Sun, 23 Feb 2014, Mike Miller wrote:

> On Sun, 23 Feb 2014, tclug at freakzilla.com wrote:
>
>> Just want to point out that you CAN skip versions with Ubuntu. Probably not 
>> unlimited version skips, but I just went from 12.04 to 13.10 on a couple of 
>> machines in one go.
>
> That's good news, but how do you do it?  The update-manager doesn't offer any 
> options of which version to upgrade to, as far as I can tell.  I looked at 
> "man do-release-upgrade" and saw the "-d" option:
>
>    -d, --devel-release
>          Check if upgrading to the latest devel release is possible
>
> I ran that on three machines.  On one is running Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS and it 
> reported downloading trusty.tar.gz, which would be Ubuntu 14.04.  That makes 
> sense because 14.04 would be the next avaiable LTS, but I think it's still in 
> alpha.
>
> Another was running Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick), but it failed while trying to 
> download natty.tar.gz, which would be Ubuntu 11.04:
>
> Checking for a new ubuntu release
> Err Upgrade tool signature
>  404  Not Found [IP: 91.189.91.14 80]
> Err Upgrade tool
>  404  Not Found [IP: 91.189.91.14 80]
> Fetched 0B in 0s (0B/s)
> WARNING:root:file 'natty.tar.gz.gpg' missing
> Failed to fetch
> Fetching the upgrade failed. There may be a network problem.
>
> There is no network problem, at least not on my end.  Maybe there's someplace 
> that I can get the .gpg file, and then maybe it will work.
>
>
> A third machine was running Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) and it downloaded 
> lucid.tar.gz, which would be Ubuntu 10.04
>
> So it seems like the -d option is not causing Ubuntu to find "the latest 
> devel release" but only the next devel release.
>
>
>
>> Now if you're going to do a reinstall, well, this is why we keep /home and 
>> /usr/local etc on separate partitions (: You can reinstall the OS and keep 
>> all your data and configuration.
>
> That sounds like a reasonable idea, but I haven't been doing that.  It isn't 
> too big of a deal to copy from backup, though.
>
> Mike
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