Linux Mint Forums

Wrinkly wrote:Thanks for all the comments.

I've now installed secipolla's

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sudo apt-get install debdelta

followed by

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sudo apt-get update && sudo debdelta-upgrade

and I've also run Vincent's

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

and both seemed to do things without stuffing up everything else. If I understand things correctly, both commands do the same job, except that debdelta does it a bit more intelligently and will save me time & bandwidth.

But, until now, I had been running MintUpdate, which is apparently not a very good idea.

So the next two questions are:
Have I somehow broken LMDE by using MintUpdate?
Should I do a complete re-install and then update using only either of the terminal commands mentioned above?

apt-get update && debdelta-upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade

secipolla wrote:Wrinkly, both commands don't do the same thing. debdelta-upgrade is an 'extra' command. It doesn't install packages it just grabs them (actually grabs and builds the deltas).
It can be run before apt-get (upgrade or dist-upgrade), aptitude (safe-upgrade or full-upgrade) or a graphical package manager.
Also you just need to run 'apt-get update' once (it gets the information of which packages are upgradable).

So if you would opt for apt-get to upgrade your system, you wold run

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apt-get update && debdelta-upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade

Note to emphasize: debdelta-upgrade is useful for people that pay for the amount of bandwidth used (as Ikey's example showed) and for people that have relatively low speed connections (and as such it is definitely useful for you, Wrinkly).

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  aspire@5315-laptop ~ $ apt-get update && debdelta-upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade
  E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/apt/lists/lock - open (13: Permission denied)
  E: Unable to lock directory /var/lib/apt/lists/
  E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13: Permission denied)
  E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?
  aspire@5315-laptop ~ $

ikey wrote:I'd also like to take the chance to +1 the debdelta-upgrade choice, I use it too.

rtrev wrote:Try adding sudo before each command. You need root privs to run these things. <g>

Wrinkly wrote:

rtrev wrote:Try adding sudo before each command. You need root privs to run these things. <g>

Oh yes. Thanks. That's much better now. Please don't let this be a symptom of dementia.

Tony.B wrote:But, as I've found to my cost, not ALL updates are GOOD updates. Some of them seem to mess up everything. Is their any way of knowing in advance if we would be better leaving things un-updated?

omns wrote:Use apt-get upgrade or Mint update to upgrade your system (instead of apt-get dist-upgrade) and wait for Clem to sort out how LMDE will upgrade safely in the future. He has stated previously that this will be worked on after the release of Mint10.