Easy Upgrade/Ubuntu Migration Tutorial

[Acid_1]

With Mint 8 being released shortly, and Mint being a derivative of Ubuntu, lot's of people want to upgrade to Mint without losing their data, and keeping their preferences. So here's how:

1) To be set up for this, you need a seperate /home partition. If you don't have this you're out of luck. If you do, keep going---

2) Open Synaptic. Go to File>Save Markings As
When the pop up for saving comes up, make sure you check off the "Save full state, not only changes". Now save it in your home directory.

3) If you've done changes to your sources.list, make sure to copy it

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sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list ~/sources.list

4) Now you can simply install the newest Mint or switch from Ubuntu to Mint. When the install is complete, simply copy your sources.list back

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sudo mv ~/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list

then run

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sudo apt-get update

Now open Synaptic, import the saved markings you have, and then hit apply and wait for it to install your apps you had. Then open a terminal and type

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sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

to run the latest patches and updates.

Edit by Husse: Never ever do that with any other repositories than those belonging to the installed version - never ever!
And as far as I can see this is what happens here - don't do this

Edit by Acid_1: I forgot--when you copy your apt sources, make sure you change the repos. So if you went from Gloria, make sure you change it to helena wherever it says gloria in the sources.list. Same with the Ubuntu repositories, if you go to helena, change it to the koala repos. This will keep you from borking your system. Thanks for clarifying Husse.
Hope this is useful to someone.

[Husse]

I made an edit in the post above -
Never ever do that with any other repositories than those belonging to the installed version - never ever!
That being sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
This is because you risk getting some Mint files overwritten by Ubuntu files and the result is truly unpredictable
Bu if you only have jaunty repositories enabled in Gloria it's perfectly OK (and so on)
This is less important over time as we "pin"* our files and add more and more to our own repositories
*Pin means that files marked with a higher pin number gets priority and we mark release o=linuxmint and origin packages.linuxmint.com with a higher pin number
This is (of course) caused by our close relation with Ubuntu, which is getting less close over time
EDIT!
I saw this in a post about upgrading and assumed that the sudo apt-get dist-upgrade was the upgrading
The upgrade path is not described - this is about keeping your applications
But

When the install is complete, simply copy your sources.list back

means that you will have a sources list pointing to an older version than installed and the warning is valid either way (newer sources.list or older)