Upgrade Ubuntu on WSL from 18.04 to 18.10
Tags: beginners, webdev, git
Published: 2019-04-01 13:14:00

---
title: Upgrade Ubuntu on WSL from 18.04 to 18.10
published: true
description: Upgrade your Windows Subsystem Linux (WSL) Ubuntu install from 18.04 to 18.10
tags: beginners, webdev, git
cover_image: https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/d9wd34n2yyybipughstz.jpg
canonical_url: https://scottspence.com/2019/04/01/update-wsl-from-18.04-18.10/
---

###### Photo by James Bold on Unsplash

## Already use WSL with Ubuntu? Want an Upgrade??

This is a guide that will cover upgrading Windows Subsystem Linux (WSL) from the current LTS version to the latest 'normal' version 18.10.

I found this post on [dev.to] this weekend detailing going from version 18.04 to 18.10 on Ubuntu for Windows Subsystem Linux. You will know form [earlier posts from me] that trying to go the update route on WSL is time consuming and you're basically better off starting again.

I tried it myself and got in a bit of trouble, you can see by checking out the comments on [David's post]

So from uninstalling my version of Ubuntu I went ahead and tried again, if you have read the comments on [David's post] you'll see that I came up against an issue with being unable to reach the 'snap store'. I don't know what that is or means but basically it stopped my upgrade and I was left not knowing if I was fully upgraded or not.

Thankfully someone else had come across the same problem and asked on [Stack Overflow], basically you need to uninstall Lxd with:

```bash
sudo dpkg --force depends -P lxd; sudo dpkg --force depends -P lxd-client
```

Now we can go about updating Ubuntu with the `do-release-upgrade` command, if you do that right away you may see something along the lines of:

![no lts upgrade](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/z1ux2rdf5i0by8jpx6lx.png)

This is setting the updater to to only check for Long Term Support versions, we're going to change that now by changing the prompt from `lts` to `normal`, in bash use:

```bash
sudo nano /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades
```

You should see the default release upgrader settings:

![default release ugrader](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/r411tazwed1oc2tgoire.png)

You'll need to set it to normal:

![default release ugrader](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/c800wq7otudak7al8cjf.png)

Now we can go and do the release upgrade command:

```bash
sudo do-release-upgrade
```

## Upgrade time!

Now I was quite surprised that it didn't _really_ take that long at all for the upgrade to complete, you may get asked questions about modified packages and weather you want to accept the maintainers or keep your version, I will always go with the maintainers version of any packages. You can do what you like with yours, I'm not your mum 😜

## That's it

You should now have your Ubuntu WSL version at 18.10 👏

![update complete](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/puuwb6pt8x0f85g7bdtm.png)

If, like me, you uninstalled Ubuntu and tried to reinstall it and are getting errors like this:

![error installing ubuntu](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/r2dqv5xyzrltgrks9dhv.gif)

Then what worked for me was to restart the `LxssManager` via a PowerShell console with admin rights.

```powershell
Get-Service LxssManager | Restart-Service
```

## Wrap up!

We went ahead an upgraded our WSL Ubuntu version from 18.04 to 18.10, we removed Lxd which isn't needed on WSL but is part of the Microsoft Store version 🤷‍♂️

Then we changed the default behaviour of the release upgrader from `lts` to `normal`.

Once we have done those two parts we can then go ahead and upgrade Ubuntu with `do-release-upgrade.

**Thanks for reading** 🙏

Please take a look at my other content if you enjoyed this.

Follow me on [Twitter] or [Ask Me Anything] on GitHub.

<!-- Links -->

[twitter]: https://twitter.com/ScottDevTweets
[ask me anything]: https://github.com/spences10/ama
[dev.to]: https://dev.to
[earlier posts from me]:
  https://blog.scottspence.me/wsl-bootstrap-2019#update-upgrade-and-autoremove
[david's post]:
  https://dev.to/david_j_eddy/how-to-upgrade-wsl-ubuntu-18-04-to-18-10-203
[stack overflow]:
  https://askubuntu.com/questions/1119301/your-system-is-unable-to-reach-the-snap-store
[codesandbox.io]: https://codesandbox.io
[render props]: https://reactjs.org/docs/render-props.html
[using the react context api]:
  http://localhost:8899/react-context-api-getting-started
[example code]: https://codesandbox.io/s/1vnvko0zqj
[even]: https://youtu.be/8ruJBKFrRCk?t=93
[gatsby documentation]:
  https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/use-static-query/