Comment 3 for bug 224486

This is almost definitely a problem with the update archive. Admittedly, this is my first ever distro upgrade of a Debian system. I searched for a "how-to", and followed it carefully.

http://ubuntu-tutorials.com/2008/04/03/dapper-to-hardy-direct-server-upgrade-works/

The output from the console window is attached. The pertinent passage is:

Error during update

A problem occurred during the update. This is usually some sort of
network problem, please check your network connection and retry.

Failed to fetch
http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/Release Unable to
find expected entry commercial/binary-i386/Packages in Meta-index
file (malformed Release file?)

I suspect that there may be a switch available, to tell update-manager to ignore the commercial software. Since I do not have any commercial software installed, it would be safe to do so.

I shall follow the previous advice, and wait a couple more days for the archive to update itself.