How to Upgrade Ubuntu 20.10 to Ubuntu 21.04

In this tutorial, we will show you how to upgrade from Ubuntu 20.10 to Ubuntu 21.04. For those of you who didn’t know, Ubuntu 21.04 “Hirsute Hippo” features the latest Ubuntu technology for desktops, servers, and all of its flavors. This release, however, features moderate changes being short-term ones. This stable release will be supported until Jan 2022.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step upgrade from Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla) to Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo).

Prerequisites

• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Upgrade Ubuntu 20.10 to Ubuntu 21.04

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Upgrade to Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo).

Before starting any upgrade process, you must back up all the data you have. Although the process is safe, it’s never too much to do for your own good. To upgrade to Ubuntu 21.04, now we run the following command below to upgrade existing software:

sudo apt dist-upgrade

Once the installation process is finished, we reboot and we will be on Ubuntu 21.04 or check your Ubuntu version with the following command:

lsb_release -a

Output:

Distributor ID:	Ubuntu
Description:	Ubuntu 21.04
Release:	21.04
Codename:	Hirsute

Congratulations! You have successfully upgraded Ubuntu. Thanks for using this tutorial for an upgrade from Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla) to Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Ubuntu website.