How To Upgrade To Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver

Introduction 

The latest Ubuntu release, 18.04, marks an opportunity for both LTS users and people on the previous 17.10 release to update Ubuntu and take advantage of the latest features. Thanks to Debian's upgrade process, it should be relatively simple to either upgrade Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 (both LTS) or to upgrade Ubuntu 17.10 to 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver, this comes with a 5 year support
In this post we will walk through the steps needed to upgrade in detail 

Objective

• Effectively upgrade your ubuntu 16.04/17.10 to 18.4 LTS Bionic Beaver. 
• Learn the purpose of some of the commands. 
• what to do if something goes wrong .

  

Requirements 

for Ubuntu Desktop Edition the minimum requirements to run the new release :

1. 2 GHz dual core processor
2. 2 GiB RAM (system memory)
3. 25 GB of hard-drive space 
4. VGA capable of 1024x768 screen resolution
5. Internet access 

Why to upgrade 

A lot has happened in Ubuntu land since the last LTS, Ubuntu 16.04, was released. 

what is new ? 

• Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will be supported for 5 years for Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, and Ubuntu Core. Ubuntu Studio 18.04 will be supported for 9 months. All other flavors will be supported for 3 years. 
• Just incase you have installed ubuntu 17.04 witch isn't LTS version 
• Enjoy the elegance of the new built in  GNOME Shell desktop and a promising preview of next-gen open source technology Wayland .
• No HUD or global menus
• Window controls on the right-hand side
• Security Improvements
• more 

How to upgrade ?

If you are familiar with ubuntu than you already know that there are many ways to upgrade the system. 

Now before doing anything i must warn you to back up all your data because who knows what might go wrong event though distribution upgrade won't affect your data only if you have a regular previous set up and no advanced modifications are already made to your system folders .   

Graphical Upgrade (update manager ) 

in order to Upgrade Ubuntu 16.04/17.10 to Ubuntu 18.04 with the Graphical Update Manager
the first thing we need is to make sure that our system is up-to-date and to do that just go to terminal
either by the keyboard shortcut :

Ctrl + alt + t 

or going to the application menu and search for Terminal after that the terminal window should appear .

we need to apply the following commands ( root privileges are required either directly as a root user or by just using sudo )

$ sudo apt-get update

This will update the list of available packages and their versions, but it does not install or upgrade any packages.

$ sudo apt-get upgrade

The upgrade command installs newer versions of the packages you have after updating the lists, the package manager knows about available updates for the software you have installed.

  $ sudo apt dist-upgrade

this is the same as the above, except add the "smart upgrade" option. It tells APT to use "smart" conflict resolution system,  and it will attempt to upgrade the most important packages at the expense of less important ones if necessary.

now one more step before we begin upgrading Ubuntu to 18.04 LTS, we may need to remove all the no longer required packages by performing the apt autoremove command

sudo apt autoremove

now after finishing those steps we are ready to upgrade now Ubuntu have developed their own automatic way of upgrading between releases. It essentially scripts the traditional Debian approach. This way, you can set it up to upgrade and walk away. Ubuntu will handle the rest automatically.
now even though Upgrades from 16.04 LTS will not be enabled until a few days after 18.04.1's release expected in late July. we can proceed with ubuntu 17.10 

• performing a  desktop upgrade
  

1. Press Alt+F2 and type  update-manager -c   into the command box.
2. Update Manager should open up and tell you that Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is now available.
3. If not you can run  /usr/lib/ubuntu-release-upgrader/check-new-release-gtk
4. Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions.

• To upgrade on a server system:

1. Install  update-manager-core  if it is not already installed.
2. Launch the upgrade tool with the command  sudo do-release-upgrade 
3. Follow the on-screen instructions.

Note that the server upgrade will use GNU screen and automatically re-attach in case of dropped connection problems.

and There are no offline upgrade options for Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server. Please ensure you have network connectivity to one of the official mirrors or to a locally accessible mirror and follow the instructions above. 

Upgrading using Terminal 

Start by executing the sudo do-release-upgrade command. In case you receive the No new release foundmessage, ensure that the default release upgrader is set to normal and re-execute the sudo do-release-upgrade command.

$ sudo do-release-upgrade

adding -d will force the upgrade

What if something went wrong ? 

If any thing went wrong like sudden power loss or any thing you can always rescue  the procedure if it is still in the package download phase by resuming , however if it happened during the package install ouuuuchhh that's bad , but  there are ways to recover and resume with terminal and save the day you can try an follow those commands

$sudo apt-get autoclean
$sudo apt-get autoremove
$sudo apt-get clean
$sudo apt update
$sudo apt-get dist-upgrade --fix-missing
$sudo apt-get dist-upgrade --fix-broken
$sudo apt full-upgrade
$sudo apt -f install
$dpkg --configure -a

There are some duplicate commands 

Closure 

its not very hard to upgrade ubuntu and this will work also on servers and for 16.04 LTS this will automatically happen the day that the official release is out .