Ubuntu: upgrading from 14.04 to 16.04, what to do if do-release-upgrade does not work

Recently I’ve tried to upgrade Ubuntu from version 14.04 to 16.04 and discovered that for some reason sudo do-release-upgrade -d doesn’t work as expected:

eax@fujitsu:~$ sudo do-release-upgrade -d
Checking for a new Ubuntu release
No new release found

There is little information about this issue in the Internet so I think this howto can really help someone.

First of all, go to System Settings -> Software & Updates -> Updates, make sure trusty-security and trusty-updates checkboxes are selected. Run:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade -V
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -V
sudo reboot

After reboot make sure your Ubuntu version is 14.04.4 now:

eax@fujitsu:/etc/apt$ cat /etc/lsb-release 
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=14.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=trusty
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS"
eax@fujitsu:/etc/apt$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:	Ubuntu
Description:	Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS
Release:	14.04
Codename:	trusty

Now edit /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades:

eax@fujitsu:~$ cat /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades
# Default behavior for the release upgrader.

[DEFAULT]
# ...
Prompt=lts # <--- CHECK THIS LINE!

After all this sudo do-release-upgrade -d should upgrade your system to 16.04.1 or newer.

Supplemental: Common issue after updating to 16.04 is a re-enabled guest login. To disable it just execute this command:

sudo sh -c 'printf "[SeatDefaults]\nallow-guest=false\n" > /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/50-no-guest.conf'
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Thanks mate! Really helped!

This helped me as well. I tried the usual commands of do-release-upgrade with the -d and -c flags. None of that worked except what you showed here. Thank you!

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