Linux Mint Forums

Has anyone done an upgrade from gloria x64 to helena x64? If so, how did it work out and what was your procedure? I would prefer not to do a fresh installation.
Thanks in advance.

I think that Clem posted upgrade instructions on the blog. There are so many differences in these two releases, ext4, xsplash, etc that I would seriously consider doing a fresh install this time.

Edit: Welcome to the forum!

I did it on a system that has undergone these violent steps:

1) Fresh install Mint 6
2) Dist-upgrade to Mint 7 - saw some system crash issues, which disappeared along with updates
3) Backed up the whole system using tar (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BackupYourSystem/TAR)
4) Dist upgrade to Mint 8 - didn't like it (some RC, I recall...)
5) Restored the whole system from the tar archive
6) Dist-upgrade to Mint 8 after the official x64 release

Been a happy camper again

This was on a T61 Thinkpad. I actually saw a power usage drop after the last upgrade to Helena (-2 watts), using PowerTop.
I come from a Ubuntu background, I started with Ubuntu in 2006. Back then a dist-upgrade was a big no-no for me, but with recent releases, it's a viable option. Especially since I'm lazy in a way and don't like to reinstall all my apps.

Cheers.

EDIT: Oh, and I used the command line option to upgrade, as described in the blog post.

I tried the following:
su
apt update
apt install mint-upgrade-tool-main

This gave me the following error:
E: Couldn't find package mint-upgrade-tool-main

Do I need to change "main" to something else for x64?

x64_user wrote: Do I need to change "main" to something else for x64?

I recall trying that, but the package was not there. Maybe they haven't created the upgrade tool for x64 yet?

As for dist-upgrading, I do agree on the majority that it is often not advicable. If you break it, you get to keep both peaces...and so on.

I have upgraded gloria x64 to helena x64 as follows:
gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
replaced all occurrences of gloria with helena
replaced all occurrences of jaunty with karmic
apt upgrade (resolved all conflicts with Y)
apt dist-upgrade (resolved all conflicts with Y)

All indications are that it was successful including wine apps.