Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish was released last year in October. It comes with new GNOME version 3.30, new default theme and icons, faster installation and boot with new compression algorithms, and more.
In this tutorial, we will focus on how to upgrade an existing Ubuntu 18.04 LTS installation to the latest version 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish.
Note that this tutorial is only valid if you are already running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on your machine. Otherwise, first upgrade your current Ubuntu system to 18.04 before attempting to upgrade to 18.10 release.
If you are not sure which Ubuntu version is installed on your machine, run the following command in your terminal:
$ cat /etc/os-release
NAME="Ubuntu"
VERSION="18.04.2 LTS (Bionic Beaver)"
ID=ubuntu
ID_LIKE=debian
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS"
VERSION_ID="18.04"
..
Upgrade to Ubuntu 18.10
Before we trigger the upgrade, make sure that we are running the latest version of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Run the following commands to update the existing packages:
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt upgrade
$ sudo apt dist-upgrade
You can remove the no longer required packages with the following command:
$ sudo autoremove
Since Ubuntu 18.10 is not an LTS release, you need to update the default release upgrader behavior. By default, release upgrader attempts to upgrade to new available LTS version. Run the following command in your terminal to change this:
$ sudo nano /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades
Set Prompt=normal and save the file. Now the release upgrader will look for a new release instead of a new LTS release.
Now, run the following command to start the upgrade process. The whole process will take several minutes to couple of hours depending on your internet connection speed.
$ sudo do-release-upgrade
During the upgrade, you may be prompted to confirm the removal of obsolete packages. After the Ubuntu upgrade is finished, you will be asked to reboot the system to load new kernel. Enter y to restart the system.
Once the system is rebooted, you can run the following command in your terminal to confirm the upgrade:
$ cat /etc/os-release
Conclusion
That's all for upgrading Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to newest version Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish. It is important to note that Ubuntu 18.10 is not an TLS release. The next Ubuntu 19.04 LTS release is due in April 2019. However, if you want to give it a try before, you can upgrade to Ubuntu 19.04 today.
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