Upgrade from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to 20.04 LTS takes too long

Hello all, I’m totally new here, and also very much a linux newbie, hope I can get a bit of help.

I set up a PC with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS several years ago but have not done much with it.

A couple days ago I learned about the release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and decided to upgrade to it. I looked up information about how to do it. I made sure that my 18.04 version was fully updated, then entered this command in a terminal window:

update-manager -c -d

Things started happening, and eventually a Distribution Upgrade dialog window came up, telling me the upgrade to version 20.04 has started. It moved through several steps:

Preparing to upgrade
Setting up new software channels
Getting new packages

The next step was started: “Installing the upgrades”, and shows that it’s “Applying changes”, with a progress bar running back and forth horizontally. So everything looks normal, as far as I can tell.

However it’s been doing this for close to 20 hours, without any change, with the progress bar still running back and forth, and a terminal window underneath it showing “Preconfiguring packages …”, something which also has not changed for all this time.

Is there something wrong? Shall I interrupt the upgrade? How would I do that?

I also still have another terminal window open, the one in which I typed the original command to do the upgrade. It’s filled with status notifications, with the last 3 lines stating:

Re-instated libcrypt-dev:amd64
Re-instated libc6-dev:amd64
Done

That’s it. I hope someone can tell me what to do next, thank you all for any help.

Hi David,

Welcome to our forums, and sorry for the late reply.

If you have another terminal open, you can check the logs and running processes to find out if there is actually any progress, or the upgrade halted at some state. I would look into /var/log/syslog, and also check around in the /var/log/apt directory about latest entries.

Thank you Sandmann. It turned out that I had Lubuntu 18.04 installed on my machine, not Ubuntu. And because of that, I believe that’s why the upgrade did not take.

So I got a download of the Lubuntu 20.04 LTS instead, set it up on a bootable USB drive, used it on my machine, and did a full, fresh installation of the new distribution.

Everything went pretty well, and I’m now the proud owner of a brand spanking new Lubuntu 20.04 LTS installation.

Thanks again for your reply, I truly appreciate your taking the time to look over my inquiry.

Davvy

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