Is it possible to upgrade for example from Ubuntu 9.10, 10.04 or even 10.10 to the latest version of Ubuntu (11.10 in this case). Am not asking to download the DVD/CD or to upgrade from one version to the other until you get to 11.10. I want to know if an older can upgrade from 9.10 directly to 11.10 or something like this.
And of course if yes or no, has this been thought about in any talks like a way to make it so that users have it easier to upgrade to the latest version in cases where it could not be done for a long time (Like moving around the world for 2 years with Ubuntu 9.10 and then coming home and looking at Unity in 11.10).
INFO – I know this 2 already exist:
How to upgrade effortlessly from Ubuntu 10.04 to Ubuntu 11.10 on the same machine
Is it possible to skip releases during an upgrade?
If the answer is still no, maybe more information about if any talks have been made to this kind of work or idea.
Best Answer
As far as I know, upgrade only works from one version to the next, i.e. from 11.04 to 11.10 to 12.04. Also, it is possible to upgrade one LTS release to the next (10.04 to 12.04).
I think there are good reasons why upgrading works this way - the upgrade procedure is developed and tested against a system in a particular state (i.e. fully upgraded 11.04) so migration scripts have some idea what to expect.
It may be very tricky have a generic migration procedure which can upgrade from some arbitrary machine state without going through each intermediate step. I'm finding that even upgrading from a not fully upgraded Ubuntu N to Ubuntu N+1 tends not to work.