I run Lubuntu on an old laptop I have, that I mostly use for watching films with Kodi. I'm not very used to Debian/Ubuntu flavours, so I'm making lots of notes.

• lsb_release -a check distro release version

When there's a new proper version of the distro things get a little trickier sometimes, especially if you haven't updated in ages.

I ran into a problem where it wouldn't update from 15.10 to 17.10 becaues for some reason it was set to only upgrade to LTS releases (fine), but I was somehow on a non-LTS! This was easy enough to change in /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades

• Getting ready / setting the table:
  1. sudo apt-get update then
  2. sudo apt-get upgrade then
  3. sudo apt-get dist-upgrade to get your current version up-to-date.
  4. sudo apt-get autoremove and
  5. sudo apt-get clean to clean up a bit.
  6. sudo apt-get install update-manager-core to make sure update mechanism is up-to-date.
• Upgrade:
  1. sudo do-release-upgrade

Adding these lines to /etc/apt/sources.list auto picks the closest mirrors when updating.

deb mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt precise main restricted universe multiverse
deb mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt precise-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt precise-backports main restricted universe multiverse
deb mirror://mirrors.ubuntu.com/mirrors.txt precise-security main restricted universe multiverse

• https://askubuntu.com/questions/39922/how-do-you-select-the-fastest-mirror-from-the-command-line#9035
• Useful? https://repogen.simplylinux.ch/