Thursday, December 26, 2013

Upgrading Linux Mint Cinnamon from Olivia to Petra

My present to myself this year was a new operating system. I burned an .iso, wrapped it up, and put it under the tree (yes - I'm a big spender). I installed it today, upgrading my system from Mint 15 to Mint 16.

My laptop is an Inspiron model 3521. It's a basic i3 with 4 gb memory. It came with Windows 7, but I quickly fixed that, installing Linux Mint 15.

I started the upgrade this morning by creating a folder in my home directory named 'backup'. First I copied my .ssh folder into the backup. Then my .Webstorm config folder. That was the easy part. Then I started zipping up some if the bigger folders - ./Documents, followed by ./Pictures, and ./Desktop. And, I put all of these zips into my backup folder.

Now my projects - I zipped up my ./workspace folder, and my ./git folder. My git folder is all copies of projects on github, and as long as my pushes are up to date, I don't really need a backup, I can just git clone them. But then I'd need to visit project folders, running npm install, cake, make, etc. So zipping is really more convenient.

I also went to my ./Downloads, and copied the installs for applications I don't install with apt-get, like eclipse or various sdk's. This way, I know I'll have the same version when I start back up.

When I was one, I zipped my ./backup folder into one big zip, and copied that to my thumb drive. I also put it in dropbox, just in case. I decided to break for lunch - it says that 3gb will take about an hour to upload.

After lunch, I put i the distro, and rebooted. It took about a half hour to install Linux. The first thing I did after I logged in was to run the Update Manager and install the latest patches.

Then I plugged in my thumb drive, and unzipped all my files where I wanted to put them. That was easier said than done. And of course, the next thing I did was visit google to install chrome. The install crashed, saying that I had a corrupt file. Fortunately, I had a copy in the downloads I had backed up, so I installed using that, and continued on.

There were no other issues. All in all, it's the best upgrade experience I've had! And the result is well worth the effort.

No comments:

Post a Comment