Ade Malsasa Akbar contact
Senior author, Open Source enthusiast.
Saturday, September 8, 2018 at 22:09


Ubuntu 16.04.5 has been released at Thursday, 2 August 2018. This tutorial explains how to upgrade 16.04 to 16.04.5 by GUI Software Updater. You will use only Software & Updates dialog to setup the repository and then upgrade your system with Software Updater dialog without using command lines in Terminal. Prepare your internet access and enjoy!

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From a Fresh 16.04


I've installed a 16.04 system (64-bit) on my laptop and this system is the one I upgraded to 16.04.5. The rest of this tutorial is based on this.

See System Settings > Details

Preparations


  • Have empty disk space >=1GB. You have 4GB free or more is better. 
  • Have a fast and reliable internet access. A basic ADSL of 1MB/s is good.
  • Stay awake in front of your computer during whole upgrade process. This may need 1 hour or more.

1. Repository Setup & Refresh


We need to set 16.04 repositories for upgrade purpose to 16.04.5.

Go to menu > find Software & Updates > make sure you give check marks to the four options > make sure your Download from: server selected is known to be fast. For example, here I choose automatically a fastest server by clicking Choose Best Server.


Go to Updates tab > make sure all three options have check marks > set Notify me: to For long-term support versions. Then finally press Close and select Reload.


Reload. Let this reloading ("Updating cache") finished.


2. See Upgrade Details


Go to menu > find Software Updater > let it examines all upgrades for you > finally it says "Updated software has been issued since Ubuntu 16.04...".

This means we are ready to upgrade to 16.04.5. Notice the total size to be downloaded as it's always huge (my example below is 600MB).

See the '16.04' version and '600MB' total download

3. Upgrade


Press Install Now button there.

This starts the download process and then upgrade process. How long these processes take time depends on your internet download speed. For 1MB/s connection I have, it takes around 30 minutes.

Downloading packages


After all download finished, Software Updater will start installing them one by one. If you open the Details section there, then a black console showing the actual process. This process alone may takes 15 minutes or more (mine 15 minutes on SSD).

Unpacking and installing packages

You may be asked once for a configuration like Unattended Upgrades configuration below. Always select default options unless you understand it differently. Your system may asks more than one configuration.

Occasionally, you will be asked to configure stuffs


4. Upgrade Finished


Once finished, Software Updater will say "The computer needs to restart..." and simply answer with Restart Now.

Finally, restart!

5. Restart & Enjoy


Restart your computer and you will have 16.04.5. Congratulations!

To check whether your upgrade process is successful or not, see 3 things:

  • 1) Invoke the command lsb_release -a
  • 2) Firefox version should be 62
  • 3) LibreOffice version should be 5.1.6

The sign that upgrade is successful

Further checking is fortunately easy by getting .manifest files of both 16.04 and 16.04.5 and comparing them. The command line is  $ diff --suppress-common-lines  -y ubuntu-16.04-desktop-amd64.manifest  ubuntu-16.04.5-desktop-amd64.manifest. You may look clearly between both releases what package versions differ.

Comparing both releases
Enjoy!

References




This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.