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Old Ubuntu/Debian apt updates and those 404's

If like me you have had annoying 404's pop up during apt-get update and no amount of fiddling with the /etc/apt/source.list then it means your Ubuntu has reached End of Life. AKA: it's an OAP.

It needs a bus pass.

So to help it out simply change all instances of archive.ubuntu.com and security.ubuntu.com to old-releases . Like so:

/etc/apt/source.list
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# From this:
#deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal main
#deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal-updates main
#deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal-security main
#deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal universe
#deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal-updates universe

# To this:
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal main
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal-updates main
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal-security main
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal universe
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal-updates universe

Then run sudo apt-get update to get the 'fresh' list of packages you're used to But its highly recommended you upgrade your distro to a more up-to-date version by following the steps at Ubuntu's community EOL page.