Upgrading to Ubuntu 20.04: Python 3 Issue

April 23, 2020 at 12:30 PM PDT

So as many of you who have been paying attention to the development of Ubuntu 20.04 may know, Canonical has finally shipped Focal Fossa! I was excited when I saw it on my Twitter feed, but then this happened when I tried to run sudo do-release-upgrade:

Checking for a new Ubuntu release
No new release found. 

I later figured out that they don’t push it to the production upgrade server immediately, but instead found adding the -d option to fix it for me. (Yay!)

However, when I ran sudo do-release-upgrade -d, I encountered another problem:

Your python3 install is corrupted. Please fix the ’/usr/bin/python3’ symlink.

Well that’s just great. AFAIK, I didn’t do anything weird with my Python symlinks. I tried reinstalling the python3 package, to no avail. I did a trusty Google search and found this post on the DigitalOcean forum: Your python3 install is corrupted. Please fix the ‘/usr/bin/python3’ symlink. Basically, the solution was to remove the /usr/bin/python3 symlink and make a new symlink to the default Python version for that package (which happened to be 3.7 for eoan).

unlink /usr/bin/python3
ln -s /usr/bin/python3.7 /usr/bin/python3

After that, I ran do-release-upgrade -d again, and it worked. (Yay!) Hopefully, you won’t get any issues with this. Tag me @josephDaCoder on Twitter if you have any questions or want to get in touch.

Cheers!