do-release-upgrade runs a bit and then hangs on WSL2

mark

10/6/23, 8:39 PM

My WSL2 currently has a single distribution - Ubuntu 18.04. I wish to upgrade it in place to the latest and so I ran the steps described in https://www.nextofwindows.com/how-to-upgrade-existing-wsl-wsl2-ubuntu-18-04-to-20-04, namely:

sudo apt update
sudo apt list --upgradable
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt --purge autoremove
sudo apt install update-manager-core
sudo do-release-upgrade

For the last step I had to follow the instructions in https://askubuntu.com/a/1296373/611551, namely to link /usr/lib/ssl/cert.pem to /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt, but it finally runs, only it fails short afterwards:

Reading cache

Checking package manager
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic InRelease
Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates InRelease
Hit http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-backports InRelease
Hit https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu bionic InRelease
Hit http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-security InRelease
Hit https://packages.microsoft.com/ubuntu/18.04/prod bionic InRelease
Fetched 0 B in 0s (0 B/s)
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done

Restoring original system state

Aborting
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
=== Command terminated with exit status 1 (Thu Oct  6 16:35:52 2022) ===

And it hangs. At this point I have no choice but aborting it. Retrying does not help.

What am I doing wrong?

183

1 + 1

upgrade

package-management

windows-subsystem-for-linux

NotTheDr01ds

11/28/23, 2:41 AM

I do keep an eye out for WSL questions here on Ask Ubuntu, but I usually look for the [tag:windows-subsystem-for-linux] tag. Did you resolve the issue (and if so, suggest posting an answer). If not, I've added an answer below - I thought there was a duplicate for this, but I can't find it now.

Score:0

Ubuntu

NotTheDr01ds

11/28/23, 2:43 AM

In my experience, this is often caused in older release upgrades by the presence of the snapd package and the lack of Systemd support in WSL. Before running sudo do-release-upgrade, try:

sudo apt remove snapd

Hopefully the upgrade will proceed as expected.

+ 1

mark

11/28/23, 6:03 PM

That seems to have helped. Thank you.

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: do-release-upgrade runs a bit and then hangs on WSL2

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