Symptoms
When installing cPanel, the installer exits with the following message.
2022-04-13 15:43:44 243 [96474] (FATAL): You can only install cPanel & WHM on a fresh installation of Ubuntu 20.04 or higher.
Description
cPanel may only be installed on a freshly installed operating system. For additional installation requirements, please see our Installation Guide.
Workaround
The OS must be reloaded or a new server must be provisioned with Ubuntu 20.04. If the server or server image was upgraded from another version of Ubuntu then it will fail the installation.
You can confirm if the server or image went through an upgrade by seeing if the following log file is available:
/var/log/dist-upgrade/main.log
Additionally, the default lib folder will be symlinked on a successful install. You can check this with the following command:
root@server:~# readlink /lib
usr/lib
If the log and the symlink are both present, the the installation should have completed successfully.