Updated my server to Ubuntu 25 10

Today I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my home server from Ubuntu 25.04 to 25.10.

But, what’s special about it? Well, I’m running a rolling release of Armbian arm64 on it, which doesn’t exactly support running do-release-upgrade by yourself. The process involved:

1. Backing up the root partition by booting from an SD card first and dd‘ing the partition’s contents via pzstd and ssh to my desktop machine, just in case I needed to roll back (like in the previous attempt).

2. Manually editing the apt sources for Armbian to replace plucky references with questing (the relevant Ubuntu codenames for 25.04 and 25.10 respectively).

3. Running do-release-upgrade to get the standard Ubuntu upgrade experience.

4. Verifying that the edge kernel images could still be upgraded after that and that the bcachefs dkms module would still build.

5. Manually updating /etc/os-release to upgrade all the Ubuntu versions and codenames to questing or 25.10, so that I don’t get the upgrade offered again (usually these values would be updated by the distro’s base-files package, but some other Armbian package would depend on the installed version, and force-installing the Questing Quokka version of the package would have needed those uninstalled, so oI just edited the file by hand).

So far so good… (fingers crossed).