Ubuntu 16.10 "Yakkety Yak" has reached End Of Life (EOL) stage at Friday 20 July 2017. This means the users won't receive official security updates from Canonical anymore. This leaves Yakkety users at least two choices, to stay at Yakkety (with using old-release repo) or to upgrade to 17.04 Zesty Zapus (by upgrading). This article explains shortly those two choices.
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Note: Recent Condition
As we know Yakkety has been reached EOL at Friday 20 July 2017, but for now 25 July the Yakkety repository is still usable (not yet deleted). Using Yakkety means waiting this repo to be removed soon. If you don't want that, read the rest.
What's EOL
End of Life (EOL) is a state when an Ubuntu version no longer receives security updates from Canonical and its repository being deleted from the archive server. From end-user point-of-view, this means: you cannot perform apt-get update and apt-get install command anymore (they will say 'error 404' or such).
First Choice: Change Sources.list
Every EOL repository (unsupported) will be moved to special server called 'old-releases' so the official 'archive' server contains only active (supported) releases. This means for 16.10, the repo would be moved to old-releases leaving the archive server with 16.04 LTS and 17.04. So, if you want to stay on 16.10, you practically just need to change your sources.list to point to the old-releases server.
Using Terminal to call Gedit as root:
$ sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
From the default lines:
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ yakkety main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ yakkety-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu yakkety-security main restricted universe multiverse
Change them to the special 'old-releases' lines and comment out yakkety-security line:
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ yakkety main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ yakkety-updates main restricted universe multiverse
#deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu yakkety-security main restricted universe multiverse
By this change, you can still install software from old-releases repo although the archive repo no longer stores the packages. See this picture:
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| Notice where the 'old-releases' should be, and '#' for every yakkety-security |
Second choice: Upgrade to 17.04
Do you like to upgrade? Instead of staying on 16.10, you can have the currently-active 17.04 Zesty Zapus that has 9 month support until January 2018. Follow the instruction from Ubuntu Wiki.
