I am currently running Ubuntu 14.04.4 on several machines. Before I commit to an upgrade to 16.04, I would like to examine the 16.04 repository contents. In the past, I have had upgrade problems when Ubuntu dropped drivers for my graphics hardware.

I am not sure about the best way to examine the 16.04 repository. Would one way be to edit temporarily the sources.list from trusty to xenial and then run 'apt list --all-versions' to see what is in the repository? Or is there a simpler and less risky approach? Of course, I don't want to screw up my 14.04 installation.

I did some LQ searches on this but didn't get any hits. Any comments or suggestions? Thanks.

There's a web search form for Ubuntu packages: http://packages.ubuntu.com/

It's a bit awkward, but you can do individual searches in specific versions of the repository. Scroll down to the search bar and you'll see the field "distribution"

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I still do not really understand what does that "examine" mean, but probably you can try a docker container.

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Thank you. This link looks like it should solve my problem.


Later ... This link did exactly what I had been hoping for. Again, thank you.

What I want to do is look at a list of the 16.04 repository entries and see that the repository still contains an appropriate nVidia driver, Gnome Flashback, gnuplot, gfortran, and a few other things I use that are of almost no interest to anyone else.

When I upgraded one of my older machines to 14.04 a while ago, it would no longer boot because there was no compatible video driver available. I couldn't even see a virtual console, although I could log in in-the-blind and enter commands without seeing the system's responses. I ended up moving the machine to Debian, which seems to have more respect for older hardware.

The docker container thing looks interesting -- new to me. Thanks for the suggestion.

why don't you download a 16.04 live image and just boot it (from an usb stick)?

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Yup, that's the next step. In the case of my old machine, now running Debian, it is so old it doesn't have the capability to boot off DVD or USB, though there may be ways around that. For my newer machines, I will definitely do the live-image thing before installing an upgrade.