Mint in place upgrade notes

mintupgradenotes.md

Mint Upgrade Notes

From http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/62 and from here https://gist.github.com/hgomez/7074150.

This page http://www.tecmint.com/upgrade-linux-mint-16-to-linux-mint-17/ was less helpful but usseful to see the whole process including screens.

1. Open a terminal and run 'sudo bash' to get a root terminal

2. Using a text editor (as root), replace the release names in the /etc/apt/sources.list using your editor of choice e.g with sed:

sudo sed -i 's/precise/trusty/' /etc/apt/sources.list # this changes the debian release

sudo sed -i 's/maya/qiana/' /etc/apt/sources.list # this changes the mint release

3. Run apt-get update

4. Run apt-get dist-upgrade

5. Follow the instructions issued, don't worry about overwriting configuration files dpkg will keep a copy in the same directory with the string .dpkg-old appended to the filename

6. Run apt-get upgrade

Some notes:

I had to run `apt-get -f install` after my `apt-get dist-upgrade` and then cycled `dist-upgrade` and `upgrade` a few times until the `dist-upgrade` ran totally clean. I'm guessing this was due to trying to jump *4* Mint versions at once.  

According to some commenters they've had issues on reboot with the `mint-meta-cinnamon`,`mint-themes` packages. It may be worthwhile to run `apt-get remove --purge <package> && apt-get install <package>` to wipe out any cruft. This seems to be more common when upgrading to cinnamon.

7. Reboot

Other Observations

GNOME Desktop & X

GNOME Desktop is terrible and crashy. I needed to log in with Cinnamon (my pref anyway), but it took far too long to figure this out on my own. If you find this, take my advice and don't bother trying to troubleshoot GNOME Desktop.

There have also been reports that modeline needs nomodeset in some scenarios. I tried this and it just made my graphics blurry.

Issue with TeX

Got this message during the upgrade:

  texlive-base:amd64 conflicts with texlive-binaries:amd64
      texlive-base:amd64 conflicts with texlive-binaries:amd64
  libreoffice-gnome:amd64 conflicts with libreoffice-core:amd64
      libreoffice-gnome:amd64 conflicts with libreoffice-core:amd64
      libreoffice-gnome:amd64 conflicts with libreoffice-core:amd64`

Again at the very end:

Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/texlive-base_2013.20140215-1_all.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)`

I resolved it like this:

From https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tex-common/+bug/1236951 comment #12:

  sudo apt-get remove --purge tex-common texlive-*

  sudo rm /etc/texmf/
    
  sudo apt-get install tex-common
    
  sudo apt-get install texlive-base
    
  sudo apt-get install texlive-latex-recommended

Postgres message

The old server and client packages are no longer supported. After the existing clusters are upgraded, the postgresql-9.1 and postgresql-client-9.1 packages should be removed.

I didn't have any old DB's I cared about so I merely removed the 9.1 server and client packages