Old Ubuntu-releases in APT / etc.

We have an old VM (Ubuntu 14.10) that we just have running – it does a very specific job, isn’t connected to anything important and just shugs along. But because of a dependency issue with external software, we needed to install a new library to it – and because of dependencies when we first set up the VM, Ubuntu was the distro selected.

Sadly all the old URLs for apt-get in sources.list had stopped working, as the mirrors no longer had that specific Ubuntu (utopic) version available.

Luckily – after a bit of using our old friend Google – I found old-releases.ubuntu.com. This is also available as an archive for content through APT, so if you prefix your old addresses with old-releases.ubuntu.com instead of whatever mirror you’re used to fetching images from, you can get last version of the packages made available when you first set up your distro.

Saved the day!

E:Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks

While attempting to upgrade to Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric) from 11.04, do-release-upgrade refused to do anything useful. The only message it felt like delivering was “E:Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks”. Googling didn’t turn up much, but a forum thread (which I seem to have lost now) suggested (among other attempts) to remove any references to external (3rd party) APT repositories. I thought do-release-upgrade did this by itself, but apparently not …

Commenting out the external repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list and in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/* solved the problem (I had spotify, dropbox and Google Chrome there), allowing do-release-upgrade to do its thing.