Canonical: Killing Maverick Meerkat and plugging its burrows? (Solution available)

I really didn’t think that I would ever have to write this kind of post

Since the end of support for Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 in April 2012, the repos are suddenly (since when?) removed as well.  This is a very serious problem since we have a number of 10.10 environments which are extremely stable and in production, with only very occasional modifications needed.  However, it is not possible to add even a simple application like vim to any of these installations by using the repositories and standard Ubuntu provided tools, since the complete repositories seem to have been removed!

Now, I realise and support the fact that Canonical cannot continue to support releases indefinitely and that’s perfectly in order.  But, hey, even Microsoft of all companies have many of the patches and updates available that were previously released even for very old products.  Ubuntu is an open source system, we use it exclusively at clients and inhouse, but in this instance you are seriously letting us down. Why can the repos not simply stay online?  I’m not asking for new updates, but simply that what was there before stays there.  There is a community as well, you know, and by what reasoning do things simply get removed?

Consider this.  Our client wants to upgrade their systems to 12.04 and have budgeted for this in the next 6-12 months.  Neither they, nor we, currently have manpower resources available to upgrade their LTSP servers and applications and to ensure that it all works.  You know that it’s not as simple as clicking the upgrade button, so why are we being put in this position?  The forced upgrade cycle is one of the main reasons why we moved away from Windows, apart from the security issues inherent in that platform, yet now Canonical is putting us in the same position.

Here is a quote from Kate Stewart’s announcement to the Ubuntu Security Announcement List:

Since its launch in October 2004 Ubuntu has become one of the most
highly regarded Linux distributions with millions of users in homes,
schools, businesses and governments around the world. Ubuntu is Open
Source software, costs nothing to download, and users are free to
customize or alter their software in order to meet their needs.

Canonical, please but the repos back online where they belong.

Update: (Please see Kate Stewart’s comment as well)

The old repos are held at http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/. All one need to do to keep Maverick (or any of the other discontinued releases) alive, is the change the repositories.  It would be great if Ubuntu could add the “old” repository to the sources in the Update Manager.  For now one has to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list to reflect the repository.

Here are the ones I changed:

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

## Partner release are not in the old repositories.
### deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ maverick partner

deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ maverick-security main restricted
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ maverick-security universe
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ maverick-security multiverse

Once the changes have been made, do a sudo apt-get update and inspect the output for any repositories that are not found and correct the corresponding line accordingly.