Maintaining an Ubuntu server is typically a smooth sail, However, the winds don’t always blow favorably, as I recently discovered when attempting to install fzf, a command-line fuzzy finder that’s quite the lifesaver for navigating through files and command history.

Here’s the command that should’ve got the job done:

sudo apt install fzf

But this time, I was in for a surprise. An error emerged from the terminal depths, stating that the mirrors were unreachable. A quick search confirmed my suspicions; Kinetic Kudu (Ubuntu 22.10) had reached it’s end of life: Ubuntu 22.10 Kinetic Kudu Reaches End of Life.

It then dawned on me that my server was on a 9-month rolling release which was no longer supported instead of the sturdy long-term support (LTS) version.

The fix was fairly straight forward and I had to update my sources.list file to point to an LTS release, such as Jammy Jellyfish (Ubuntu 22.04), which is supported until April 2027.

Here’s the command I used to replace ‘kinetic’ with ‘jammy’ in the sources list:

sudo sed -i -e 's|kinetic|jammy|g' /etc/apt/sources.list

Then, to ensure my server could fetch updates again, I ran:

sudo apt update

With the sources.list amended, I could finally install fzf and get back to work.