Recently I installed Ubuntu Server 6.06 (Dapper) on an old Sun Blade 100 which has a SPARC processor. The installation on a Sun Blade 100 has its own quirks, but after getting it up and running I of course wanted to make sure it had the latest software versions and security updates that it could support.

Problem

After support for an old Ubuntu releases has been dropped the folks at Canonical remove the repositories from their main repository servers such as archive.ubuntu.com and security.ubuntu.com. So, when you run sudo apt-get update you are met with a list of errors telling you that the your configured repositories were not found.

Solution

To get back on the repository train, edit your /etc/apt/sources.list and replace all instances of archive.ubuntu.com and security.ubuntu.com with the very fitting old-releases.ubuntu.com. After that, run sudo apt-get update and watch the repository indexes roll in!

Here is an example of an updated /etc/apt/sources.list for Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper):

## Uncomment the following two lines to fetch updated software from the network
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper main restricted
deb-src http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper main restricted

## Uncomment the following two lines to fetch major bug fix updates produced
## after the final release of the distribution.
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper-updates main restricted
deb-src http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper-updates main restricted

## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from the 'universe'
## repository.
## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu
## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to
## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in
## universe WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu security
## team.
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper universe
deb-src http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper universe

deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper-security main restricted
deb-src http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper-security main restricted

deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper-security universe
deb-src http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper-security universe

deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper multiverse
deb-src http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper multiverse

deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu dapper-backports main restricted universe multiverse

That’s it for today, I hope this has helped you get the software you need onto an old Ubuntu installation.