The next step in building my own Alexa device, was to register it with the AVS Console. Once I found the page, this turned out to be pretty straightforward.

Next, I need to update Ubuntu. This could be a challenge. I started by trying to install the updater through the user interface. No joy. It couldn’t download some of the packages. 404 errors.

Then I found this article on medium.com: Upgrade Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I don’t know about you, but I pay the $5 a month for medium. There’s all sorts of useful articles out there. This one had me run these commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo do-release-upgrade -f DistUpgradeViewNonInteractive

I’m waiting for the first one to finish. It took a couple of minutes. Now for the second one. The second one completed fine. However, the third command said it was missing the do-release-upgrade command. A quick google found this:

sudo apt install ubuntu-release-upgrader-core

This seems to have worked. Now the do-release-upgrade is off and running. The instructions say to go for dinner. So, since it’s 5:40 AM, I’ll be finding something else to do and I’ll periodically check on the upgrade. Wish me luck. This is only the first upgrade, from 14.04 to 16.04. I need to get to 18.04 before I install the AVS.