Upgrading Mesa

[abickerton]

I'm running an Ivy Bridge HD4000 (i965) graphics. At the moment I'm trying to work out how to get mesa 8.x as the current LMDE version is 7.11(?).
Can anyone suggest the best way to do so?
Should I follow Debian testing? if so, do I just swap the repos it sources.list for those of debian testing?

- I'm running a vanilla 3.4.4 kernel if it makes any difference.

[zerozero]

first question: do you really need the new mesa version? (no catch here, i really don't know the relation between the updated mesa and Ivy Bridge)
second question: what DE you're using?

[abickerton]

Strictly speaking, no, I don't need Mesa 8. But, this is a new system, and I'd like to make sure 3d is correctly enabled. I've previously seen the intel drivers crash out and have seen a post that mentioned a Mesa upgrade.

DE is MATE (I'm intending to run compiz), but Gnome shell is also installed.

Thanks,

[zerozero]

ok, the easiest/quickest way is indeed to switch to testing although UP5 should be close and all those updates made available in the default lmde repos.

running mate you have one problem less to worry about (hence my question about the DE you're using) because the switch to testing atm would break cinnamon (mutter and colg incompatibilities), gnome-shell will run fine though;

one final word, before you move on into testing you should check /etc/apt/preferences (my advise is to simple delete it), if you do a forum search for "preferences" you'll see this issue in several topics and ofc goes without saying you need the necessary repos

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deb http://packages.linuxmint.com/ debian main upstream import backport romeo
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ testing/updates main contrib non-free
deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org testing main non-free

this should do it.

you are going to get a huge update (circa 1000 pkgs) do it please in the terminal with

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apt update && apt dist-upgrade

read very very carefully the output, if it fails (for some strange reason but it can happen) use

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sudo apt-get -f install

and

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sudo dpkg --configure -a

and after that again

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apt dist-upgrade

if all this i was typing is old news to you even better

[abickerton]

Thanks, I'll give it a go.