Mint 14 -> Mint 15 -> Mint 16

mint141516.md

Mint upgrade procedures

Some investigation and tests on how to upgrade Mint machine.

Tests performed on Mint Cinnamon 14/15/16, on physical machine 14->15 and VirtualBox VMs for 14->15->16 and 14->16.

As usual you could break your machine, so please do backups before and cross fingers.

Mint 14 -> Mint 15

Mint 14 to Mint 15 update procedure was :

$ sudo sed -i 's/quantal/raring/' /etc/apt/sources.list
$ sudo sed -i 's/nadia/olivia/' /etc/apt/sources.list
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo shutdown -r now

Mint 15 -> Mint 16

Mint 15 to Mint 16 update procedure is :

$ sudo sed -i 's/raring/saucy/' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list
$ sudo sed -i 's/olivia/petra/' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo shutdown -r now

Mint 14/15 -> Mint 16

If you updated from Mint 14 to Mint 15, upgrading to Mint 16 should be :

$ sudo sed -i 's/raring/saucy/' /etc/apt/sources.list
$ sudo sed -i 's/olivia/petra/' /etc/apt/sources.list
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo shutdown -r now

Only fresh install of Mint 15 has /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list, but when updated from Mint 14 /etc/apt/sources.list is still defined and used.

Mint 14 -> Mint 16

If you want to update from Mint 14 to Mint 16, procedure should be :

$ sudo sed -i 's/quantal/saucy/' /etc/apt/sources.list
$ sudo sed -i 's/nadia/petra/' /etc/apt/sources.list
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ sudo shutdown -r now

Only fresh install of Mint 15 has /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list, but when updated from Mint 14 /etc/apt/sources.list is still defined and used.

Tests

• Mint 14 -> Mint 15 -> Mint 16 : Works

• Mint 14 -> Mint 16 : Works

### Side notes

#### Cleaning /etc/apt/sources.list

Remove contents from /etc/apt/sources.list and stick with /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list

deb http://packages.linuxmint.com petra main upstream import
deb http://extra.linuxmint.com petra main
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu saucy main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu saucy-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ saucy-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu/ saucy partner

Mint Software Source will be able to update it from UI.

Mint Theme Broken ?

I got Mint Theme broken on one updated instance. I restore back using :

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get upgrade

A fresh mint-themes was installed

medibuntu

medibuntu has been closed, so it may be usefull to disable it from /etc/apt/sources.list :

...
# deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ raring free non-free
....

VirtualBox

Ensure VirtualBox drivers are correctly registered in new kernel :

sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup

Optimus / Bumblebee

You may encoutered error about missing libturbojpeg.so

"error while loading shared libraries: libturbojpeg.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory"

To fix it :

sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libturbojpeg.so.0 /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libturbojpeg.so

I followed Bumblebee page and now use nvidia driver 319 (vs 304)

sudo apt-get install nvidia-319-updates nvidia-settings-319-updates

Linux Mint 16 to 17

sudo sed -i 's/saucy/trusty/' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list
sudo sed -i 's/petra/qiana/' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

On configuration file changes reply always with: install the package maintainer's version
If services needs to be restarted choose Yes.

sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo shutdown -r now

I did one upgrade and it worked!

Keep in mind that you get new 'Mint 17' backgrounds. Old 'Mint 16' backgrounds are still there.
After the upgrade I was confused to see still the Mint 16 background, but the install respected not to change my current settings.

Did another upgrade. Laptop, Dual Core 2 GHz. Downloading of 1800 packages took 10 minutes.
Installation of all these packages took in my case 1 hour and 10 minutes.

Keep in mind: There is an anoying bug: see this post and my comment: linuxmint/cinnamon#3076

Update: Solved the bug! mintlocale is missing.
Just install it:

sudo apt-get install mintlocale

Tnx. This works. 👍

Hmm.. in my fresh mint 14 from january 2013 there's nothing in sources.list, all is separated in files in sources.list.d folder, but ya. ;]

thanks! this works like a charm upgrading from 14 to 16

what can i do to upgrade from mint 13?

For what it's worth: I didn't find this elsewhere, so maybe this saves someone half an hour of futile web searching... This gist comes up pretty high when one searches for upgrade procedure, so here goes.
I have upgraded Nadia -> Qiana directly, by changing sources.list. It's a development box and I know this is not really a supported path. However the libs I use take a long time to configure correctly and I dislike wrestling with autotools (that thing should be forgotten already) so I figured it's worth trying.

There was a glitch or two in the process, with dist-upgrade stopping a few times. A healthy dose of "apt-get install -f" and a few reruns of dist-upgrade fixed that. That machine is mostly as a headless box so I did everything via ssh.

After rebooting the machine it worked well - except for not being able to log in via xrdp at all. The same happens if Xclient script was selected in the login menu when on the console. I'd only get a black screen with cursor and nothing else. Xrdp log would say I have disconnected within a second after login. No xsession-errors (at least none that would matter).

When logging on the console directly, with MATE environment selected instead of having the Xclient script selected, everything fired up just fine. So I figured something is wrong with starting X via Xclient script. The problem? During the upgrade process, one of the packages changed a symlink of

/etc/alternatives/x-session-manager

so that it pointed to gnome-session - that is wrong for Mint.
Solution: check first whether the x-session-manager symlink points to gnome-session:

ls -la /etc/alternatives/x-session-manager

If it does point to gnome-session, this should fix it:

rm /etc/alternatives/x-session-manager
ln -s /usr/bin/mate-session /etc/alternatives/x-session-manager

For me, the update was a success. Local logins work just fine, and xrdp works as well.
(I'm guessing the equivalent solution for a Cinnamon edition is to make the symlink point to cinnamon-session - but haven't tried that).

Thanks! I worked for me

Superb list.
Fyi from 15 to 16 i also had to run sudo sed -i -e 's/archive.ubuntu.com\|security.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list

Keep an eye here too http://superuser.com/questions/779156/how-to-upgrade-from-linux-mint-15-to-linux-mint-17