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upgrading Mint from 8 to 9

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FudgeNuggets

Member
Joined
Mar 2, 2006
Location
Gone Racing
I really don't want to reinstall the damned thing, it was a big enough pain in the *** to get XP installed through Virtualbox HSE (I think the HSE stands for Hosed Standard Edition). Is there a decent way to upgrade from 8 to 9 without blowing it all away and starting over?
 
In the introduction, he essentially tries to dissuade people from upgrading if things work well, then he later discourages trying to upgrade rather than reinstall. Maybe I'll leave things as they are.

Anybody using 9 yet to tell me if it's worth the effort?


However, he kind of slips this in at the end and it looks much easier. Any cons?

Method
Open a terminal and run 'sudo bash' to get a root terminal
Using a text editor (as root), replace the contents of /etc/apt/sources.list with the following sources list: http://pastebin.com/wVGb13y3 (extracted from Linux Mint 9)
Run 'apt-get update'
Run 'apt-get dist-upgrade'
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
Run 'apt-get upgrade'
Reboot
 
I always do a full reinstall. I know the main reason they say not to "upgrade" is that it may potentially break your system. I'm guessing leaving some stuff from Mint 8 that could potentially mess with Mint 9.

I'm running Mint 9 and the quicker boot up is a huge plus, some other nice updates to the Mint software, like their backup and software manager. I would say it's worth it.
 
Generally, if you're keeping your /home directory mounted to a separate partition, simply doing a full reinstall usually will have fewer problems. Only cases that come to mind as potential obstacles would happen if you were moving from say, kde 3.5.x to 4.x, or the like.
 
I also always do a full reinstall.
I keep a seperate /home partition and then the only difficulty is reinstalling programs which doesnt take very long at all. All my Preferences/docs/favorites etc etc are still there after a base install.
 
I gave the upgrade route a whirl after baking up all my stuff. It killed all the USB drivers, leaving me with no mouse/keyboard.

Went to install mint9-64 and discovered that it has no driver for the onboard sound of my p5q pro, i'm less then pleased with mint9 now.
(All other dists i've tried picked the sound up without any issue at all)
 
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