When we published the articles about the Hirsute Hippo family releases, there were several things that we repeated. Among them, that it could already be updated from the same operating system. And it is that, in general, Canonical allows updating from the existing installation even before uploading the ISO images to its server, but this time it was not like that. You couldn't, until today: you can now upgrade from Ubuntu 20.10 to Ubuntu 21.04.
This time, Canonical blocked the possibility due to a bug which sometimes caused the operating system to fail to start using EFI 1.10. Today, May 12, they have released a revision that fixes the bug, so updating is now possible. It is likely that the notification still does not jump, in part because it usually jumps after a few months (up to three), but it can be stopped as we will explain below.
How to upgrade from Ubuntu 20.10 to Ubuntu 21.04
So and as we explained two years ago, the tool used to take this shortcut is update-manager. This tool is installed by default in Ubuntu, but it is not installed in Kubuntu for example. So the first steps of this list will not be necessary for Ubuntu or flavors that already have update-manager installed, but it does not hurt to follow them to verify that it already exists:
- We make a backup of important files.
- We open a terminal and make sure that there are no packages to update with this command:
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade
- We install update-manager:
sudo apt install update-manager
- We restart the operating system.
- Once we go back in, we open the terminal and write this command:
update-manager -c
- We accept the message that appears.
- Finally, we follow the instructions that appear on the screen. When we restart we will enter Hirsute Hippo.
Ubuntu 21.04 Hirsute hippo I arrive with Linux 5.11, but one of the novelties that will be missed is GNOME 40. It is a normal cycle release that will be supported for 9 months.