Keeping old debian mint current

[degarb]

In 2010 I installed a debian mint because it had better, more seemless upgrading. I HATE UPGRADING Linux OSes. Never liked it (no printer, flakey samba, no macro ala. ahk, no bulk cd ripping, no ghost recording flash while asleep, no voice data entry, no bulk encoding dvds, I hate linux commandline/prefer easier and more useful dos, everything is harder in linux)-- enough complaints.

I got new xp machine, and wish to retire the xp on this old machine and boot into Mint partitions, since I don't need the xp features, and cannot reinstall the oem xp (no disk) to fix some registry problems that are making xp unstable at times.

However, after taking 20 hours in 2010 to customize and get my mint half way useful, I have no stomach to fiddle with it. But the update manager isn't working, programs wont install in synaptic.

My guess is the repositories locations have changed.

[zerozero]

[...] I HATE UPGRADING Linux OSes. Never liked it (no printer, flakey samba, no macro ala. ahk, no bulk cd ripping, no ghost recording flash while asleep, no voice data entry, no bulk encoding dvds, I hate linux commandline/prefer easier and more useful dos, everything is harder in linux)-- enough complaints.

[...]

this is the best description i found why someone shouldn't be using LMDE. you just can't leave it (specially if you installed the first isos > based upon testing) almost 2 years without updating and now expect miraculously that everything will work: it doesn't work that way, testing requires frequents (at least weekly) updates.

from the system you have installed to the system you are trying to update now everything changed and a lot: every single lib in your system was updated several times during these 2 years, it's now a major bump in version number.

honestly i don't believe it can be one, not easily, not without a lot of terminal work (the kind of thing you hate).

in one word, your system as-is is broken, my best advise is to get the newest MInt 13 maya http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2031 (it's a LTS release, supported for 5 years)

good luck.

[degarb]

PITA, forced updates, which are not painless. The xp oem is from 2001, no disks, painless xp update system still works, but something is not right with the oem old xp stability at times. Not very interested in a Pirateby xp nor worth buying xp for it. Mint lmde runs and boots faster now and fine on the machine about 90 percent of the time (moving the xp aps with no linux replacement to another machine).

One obstacle is that I only have a 13 gig partition for LMDE. Which is fine, now. Even about twice what Ubu 9.8 or xp needs on my 2003 laptop. But likely a big enough partition for for the new lts.

Anyway, I still am running Ubuntu 9.8 on an old machine, where I believe, updating would kill the 2003 laptop. I had to change the repositories to some archives about 6 months ago. Now, most programs will install on that machine.