Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 8 years and 4 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) was released almost two months ago, but I only just realized I hadn’t upgraded yet (this happened to me during the last .10 release as well). This upgrade was a little smoother than last time, but not without its hiccups.

The upgrade process uses screen to keep everything running separately in a separate shell in case you’re disconnected (I run a headless server, remember). The download of all the upgrade packages went just fine, but at the first configuration file difference (where you’re prompted to keep the maintainer’s version or your customized one), after I viewed the details of the change screen terminated and I wasn’t able to reconnect to the session! I tried sudo screen -list followed by sudo screen -d -r root/30719.ubuntu-release-upgrade-screen-window but that just reconnected me to the terminated screen session and dpkg wouldn’t resume because another process was already running. I had to manually kill all the upgrade processes and the use sudo dpkg --configure -a to resume the reconfiguration step. The rest of the upgrade went fine, luckily.

Post-upgrade, I re-applied my changes to the affected configuration files. Additionally, I had to update the Blowfish secret for phpMyAdmin to fix an error there. I also had an issue with wpa_supplicant (my server has wired and wireless NICs) that I had to fix to be able to re-connect to the WiFi network (hence the reference to “it won’t talk back” in my post title 😉 ).

Next year we’ll get 17.04 Zesty Zapus. Will Ubuntu then wrap around back to “A” names?