This is a quick PSA for anyone who thinks they might be screwed if they lose their shell during do-release-upgrade: You aren’t. Just log back in and run dpkg --configure -a. You’ll finish configuring all the packages you didn’t get to before. Don’t forget to reboot to start using the new kernel. 🙂

As a bonus, you can run aptitude to remove/purge any (now) obsolete packages.1


  1. Of course, this works best if you’ve been using aptitude all along and it has a good idea of what packages have been automatically installed. ↩︎