Upgrade from an End of Life Ubuntu release

I found myself up a creek without a paddle when I repeatedly passed up chances to upgrade the OS running in a VM until after the OS had gone to End of Life (EOL).

Then it was too late.

So what now?

I found this post, which had the right stuff.

Short form, in case it disappears:

Fix /etc/apt/sources.list with this command

sudo sed -i -re 's/([a-z]{2}\.)?archive.ubuntu.com|security.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

Update with

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

then do the release upgrade with

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install update-manager-core
sudo do-release-upgrade

Nice thing about doing it in a VM: if it doesn't work you can always just go back to your previous snapshot.

Did I mention: take a snapshot before you start?

I should have, shouldn't I have.

EDIT: It worked, as in, it did not blow up. And, lesson learned, I took a snapshot before attempting a reboot. Which was a good thing, because it didn't reboot.

But then I ran:

sudo dpkg --configure -a

Or maybe even this recommended sequence:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get clean

sudo apt-get autoremove

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo dpkg --configure -a

sudo apt-get install -f

And now it seems to be OK. As in: seems.