Linux Mint 18 codenamed “Sarah”

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JosephM
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Re: Linux Mint 18 codenamed “Sarah”

Post by JosephM »

Reorx

As far as personal preference I agree with both you. I prefer fresh installs. A lot of users apparently do not though. For good, bad, or whatever (imho, mostly good) I see that site pointed to a lot on these forums. My only issue is with making statements like this about a tool that doesn't even exist yet. I don't speak for the whole Mint team by a long stretch, only myself, but if this can't be done in a way that they are fairly confident will work for most people I doubt you will ever see it offered.
When I give opinions, they are my own. Not necessarily those of any other Linux Mint developer or the Linux Mint project as a whole.
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Reorx
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Re: Linux Mint 18 codenamed “Sarah”

Post by Reorx »

JosephM wrote:Reorx

... but if this can't be done in a way that they are fairly confident will work for most people I doubt you will ever see it offered.
I agree whole heartedly - we have nothing to argue about! :mrgreen: But I seek absolute confidence and I don't mind paying for that level of confidence with a little work on my part! Plus, my way, I get the added benefits of some house cleaning and a little learning along the way... :mrgreen:
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Cosmo.
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Re: Linux Mint 18 codenamed “Sarah”

Post by Cosmo. »

Reorx,
In your addition of needed time for a new installation you forgot 2 things:
At first the needed time for downloading the ISO.
At second the aspect, that the user can - possibly (as said, nobody does really know the process of upgrading between 2 major versions) - continue to work during the upgrade (= saved time).

At now I do not say, if it will be advisable to upgrade from inside of the old system; I leave this open, until I have seen and tested it.

If I think about this question at this - much to early - time, I come to the questions, which I already mentioned yesterday.
At now we can also start to find out regarding the first question in my yesterday's post. Here I see the real possible trouble.
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Reorx
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Re: Linux Mint 18 codenamed “Sarah”

Post by Reorx »

Cosmo - I D/L the ISO while I am doing other things (it only takes (me) 4 minutes to D/L)! :lol: and I would NEVER do work on the computer while it is upgrading - that is just courting disaster IMO! :lol:
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Re: Linux Mint 18 codenamed “Sarah”

Post by Pjotr »

Cosmo. wrote:
JosephM wrote:I don't understand this recommendation.
Seconded with 200 %.
100 % is the maximum. More than 100 % is just exaggeration.
This "recommendation" is given with zero knowledge about the mechanism and its consequences. It is purely speculative. Sadly this speculative judgment has already be given several months ago.
And how anybody wants to claim to know, that a clean installation is "a lot"(!) quicker than an upgrade, is over my head. How can one compare 2 things, if only one of them is at the time of writing available at all? Using a time machine (aka "Back to the Future ...").
As I've stated on the web page I've referred to, I have experience with Ubuntu release upgrades. Years of them. A clean upgrade, meaning a clean installation of the new version, is *much* faster. For Ubuntu, and no doubt for the upgrade from Mint 17.x to 18 as well.

Reason: an in-place upgrade from 17.x to 18, requires replacing a running system. That's a much slower and much more complicated process than a clean install. It can't be compared in any way to an upgrade within the 17 series, which leaves most of the codebase intact.

Now as to the risks. As said, the codebase change from 17.x to 18 is massive. Which means that system tweaks and/or (manually installed?) drivers which were right for 17.x, may be wrong or even disastrous for 18. The *only* way to make sure that no such deleterious leftovers are inherited in 18, is a clean installation.

That's why the success percentage of an in-place upgrade from 17.x to 18, will necessarily be lower than a clean install of 18. That's not rocket science. That's common sense.

Therefore I regret the decision of the Mint developer team, to create an option for an in-place upgrade from 17.x to 18. Creating that option *within the 17 series* was a great idea. For the upgrade from 17.x to 18: not so much.
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Re: Linux Mint 18 codenamed “Sarah”

Post by Cosmo. »

Pjotr wrote:More than 100 % is just exaggeration.
Resulting out of a speculative "recommendation" with arguments, that have and could never been proven (like "a lot quicker").
Pjotr wrote:I have experience with Ubuntu release upgrades.
At the top of the page is written "Linux Mint". Experiences with the Mint major version upgrade are at now impossible. Experiences with Ubuntu do not count, if there is not the slightest idea, how far they are comparable at all.

I remember having read by Clem:
Clem about upgrading wrote:Ubuntu's recommended solution isn't something we want to back though, it's not good enough for us to recommend. Automation is one thing and making a process trivial is usually an improvement, but when that process is risky, automation is really dangerous.
This doesn't sound, as if we would see a "minty" ubuntu-like upgrader.

Recommendations about something, what nobody has ever seen and what cannot be judged by anybody, are speculations and lead easily to myths. That is "common sense".

You may regret the announced upgrade mechanism; nothing to say against that. That is free opinion. But formulating a recommendation, as if practical experiences would exist, is not a valid base for serious evaluation.

BTW: There is in your "recommendation" a factual mistake: You talk about upgrading via update manager as if it would be written in stone, that the upgrade will be done on this way. Clem wrote on one place, that this might be possible, but also another way (possibly a separate tool) could be the way. At the time he wrote this, he had obviously not made a decision about that, but you seem to know more than Clem himself.
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Re: Linux Mint 18 codenamed “Sarah”

Post by Cosmo. »

Reorx wrote:Cosmo - I D/L the ISO while I am doing other things ... and I would NEVER do work on the computer while it is upgrading
Who says or is able to say that the upgrader is not possibly clever enough, to do the needed downloads in the background and prompts the user, when the real upgrade process starts? I admit, that this is pure speculative and I have no idea, if Clem thinks about something like that, but it would be a solution, which I would use. The (no) risk would be exactly the same as with your method.

BTW: I am not as lucky as you regarding Internet bandwidth. Downloading a Mint ISO takes for me more than one hour and in 4 minutes I do not even get more than 25 % of the updates after the first installation.
BTW2: I am a little bit astonished, because you wrote, that you need about 15 to 20 minutes for the pure installation. Because of tremendous performance problems with Sarah I created a few days ago a test-system with an installation, which contains nothing than what is on the ISO. To do so I disabled any network access for that machine completely. I found - in a virtual machine, so not the quickest environment - that the installation needed 6 minutes. That would leave with your values for downloading some packages during installation 9 to 14 minutes alone for those downloads. That does somehow not match with the 4 minutes for more than 1.5 GB. Even with my small bandwidth I needed today about 20 minutes with activated network connection to install Sarah final.
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Reorx
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Re: Linux Mint 18 codenamed “Sarah”

Post by Reorx »

Cosmo. wrote:
Reorx wrote:Cosmo - I D/L the ISO while I am doing other things ... and I would NEVER do work on the computer while it is upgrading
Who says or is able to say that the upgrader is not possibly clever enough, to do the needed downloads in the background and prompts the user, when the real upgrade process starts? I admit, that this is pure speculative and I have no idea, if Clem thinks about something like that, but it would be a solution, which I would use. The (no) risk would be exactly the same as with your method.
We're debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin! All I was telling this thread is MY point of view and how I approach upgrading.
Cosmo. wrote:BTW: ...
I admit that I was speaking from memory. So I went out and
1) Benchmarked my internet thrroughput - I got this >>> LINK
2) Did a test D/L of LM18C64 stable (from my favorite server) & used a stopwatch to time it >>> D/L time = 2:52 although D/L times can vary depending on server, server traffic, and server location. During an installation, I don't try to fiddle with D/L mirror choices and just use the defaults. Maybe I'll try changing mirrors to optimize installation performance (never thought of that before!). I'll post my actually installation times later this weekend... maybe my memory is faulty - I AM getting older...
Last edited by Reorx on Sun Jul 03, 2016 5:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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whiskeytown

Re: Linux Mint 18 codenamed “Sarah”

Post by whiskeytown »

doing a fresh install - safari so good - having some streaming audio codec issues with Clementine - what I'll do is reboot after I get my Win 10 VM installed in Virtualbox - (always good to have a backup)
liminjun

Re: Linux Mint 18 codenamed “Sarah”

Post by liminjun »

Great Job.
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Barbados99
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Re: Linux Mint 18 codenamed “Sarah”

Post by Barbados99 »

Regarding the "fresh install" vs "upgrade" thing, I can certainly understand it's a personal preference. It occurred to me when installing Mint 18 that it's pretty easy to do a fresh install. I have done the "fresh install" and configured everything I need in about an hour. I then load my data files (not a big deal at all). I have been doing this since I first started using Mint, with Mint-13. Every new release I nuke my computer and do a fresh install. It's now a pretty easy drill for me.

If someone wants to go the upgrade route, I can understand that decision. But doing a fresh installation is not a big deal either.

The most important thing for me is to keep my backup files current. That way, if I have a catastrophic event (like losing a hard drive) I can easily install a fresh install of Mint, load my data files, and get going again. I keep a copy of the most current iso on a bootable USB, so if I do need to redo my OS it's not that big of a deal.

LOL, this works for me anyway :-)
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Re: Linux Mint 18 codenamed “Sarah”

Post by Reorx »

Cosmo;

OK, as promised... I re-did the partitioning on my experimental machine... wiped all the installations on it, created a new partitioning scheme and then installed 5 varieties of Linux Mint – LMDE2C64, LM18C64, LM18M64, LM17.3C64, LM17C64 and actually clocked some installation & updating times. I'll try to keep this short as I have a lot of data that most would find mind numbing.

MACHINE: Dell Inspiron 3531 (laptop) – BIOS = Dell A00 4/11/2014 (original firmware – never upgraded). Original cost, purchased new from Dell (in 2014) was $250 (under $300 USD including tax and shipping)! :mrgreen:

CPU: Intel Celeron N2830 (Max speed = 2.4 GHz)

RAM: 4 GB

HD: 500 GB 5,400 rpm spinning platter (Seagate ST500LT012)

Network connection: WiFi with ISP stated D/L speed of 75 Mbps. D/L actual benchmark results using a geographically close server typically 50 to 60 Mbps. Recent D/L time of the LM18C64 ISO (1.7 GB) took just under 3 minutes. WiFi adapter: Qualcomm Atheros AR9485 Wireless Network Adapter (supported under all Mint versions installed) – NO ethernet connection.

Installation times: I measured a lot of Split Times (STs) and “Start To Finish Times” (STFTs). STFTs were measured from the time I pushed the power button to boot the live USB(2) stick to the when the Machine had come to rest on the desktop the boot after the install and initial update. STFTs do not include any time used to create a bootable Live USB stick. The best STFTs were ~38 minutes and the worst were ~58 minutes. The worst times were due to the amount of time required to install 450 to 500 MB of update packages (24 to 26 minutes) on the older versions (LMDE2 and LM17) on this hardware set. Simple Installation Times (measured from clicking “Install” to finish of installation) ran ~15 (14 to 17) minutes. Simple Update Times (click install to finish) were 12 to 26 minutes.
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Re: Linux Mint 18 codenamed “Sarah”

Post by MtnDewManiac »

If you are looking for fast installation times - and if you have an existing linux installation on a separate partition - I saw amazingly fast (well... I was amazed :roll: ) times when I followed the directions that someone gave me in a thread here to place the .ISO in the partition that I wished to keep (for obvious reasons - the one that I was installing to would be formatted), then placing that .ISO into my grub(2?) menu so that I could boot to it just like I normally would with any linux setup that was actually installed in a partition.

I had originally wanted to do this because my laptop's optical drive is pooched and it has NO provision for booting from a USB device or memory card. I was just hoping that it would be possible to install a new Mint without having to use anything but the single hard drive that I was installing to; I never thought about how much faster it would make the process (much faster than USB 2.0 flash drives, and very much faster than from DVD... IDK how it would compare with installing from USB 3.0). It was the quickest install of any OS that I have ever performed.

I guess that I will need to find that thread this month so that I can upgrade to Mint 18 next month :P . It appears that I was not smart enough to bookmark it.

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Acewiza

Re: Linux Mint 18 codenamed “Sarah”

Post by Acewiza »

I'm not seeing an XFCE version of Sarah yet. Is that still in the works?
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Re: Linux Mint 18 codenamed “Sarah”

Post by Pjotr »

Acewiza wrote:I'm not seeing an XFCE version of Sarah yet. Is that still in the works?
Yes. I expect it in a month or so....
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Re: Linux Mint 18 codenamed “Sarah”

Post by Acewiza »

Pjotr wrote:Yes. I expect it in a month or so....
Cool. I plan on using it build a 4-channel IDS tap monitor, but not really in any hurry to get started on that. It's summer fun time right now! :D
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Re: Linux Mint 18 codenamed “Sarah”

Post by Fred Barclay »

Acewiza wrote:It's summer fun time right now! :D
Lucky Northern Hemisphere! :x :lol:
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Re: Linux Mint 18 codenamed “Sarah”

Post by Pjotr »

Fred Barclay wrote:
Acewiza wrote:It's summer fun time right now! :D
Lucky Northern Hemisphere! :x :lol:
It's weird down under.... People standing on their heads all the time, Christmas in summer.... :shock:
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Re: Linux Mint 18 codenamed “Sarah”

Post by MtnDewManiac »

Pjotr wrote:
Acewiza wrote:I'm not seeing an XFCE version of Sarah yet. Is that still in the works?
Yes. I expect it in a month or so....
In addition to the normal delay caused by the (completely understandable) strategy of concentrating on developing/releasing the two most popular (DE-)versions of Mint and then - presumably - paying close attention to any bug reports of same in order to fix any bugs/issues that were missed by the testers but were found by some of those who began using it soon after its official release...

Might Clem be waiting to see if the crashing issues that people have been reporting with new(er) versions of Thunar, Xfce's file manager, are dealt with? I would like to see Mint Xfce 18 as much as the next person (and more than some?). But not if I have to install a separate file manager to (for example) perform copy/move operations. One of the reasons that I have liked Xfce so much during the past several years is that its "default/stock" components - desktop environment, window manager, file manager, etc. - always seemed to function well as a unit and provide just about everything that I needed, but relatively little that I did not. In other words, it would lose some of its appeal if I had to use a different file manager. Another reason that I have enjoyed using Xfce is that, although there seem to be some kind of bugs/issues in any complex computer code from time to time, any that have been in Xfce have more or less failed to impact me personally. There was one (I do not remember the specifics) back when I was using Mint 14 - but it was a minor annoyance only, and after I griped about it elsewhere, I saw that the developer had "cherry-picked a few issues to repair" - which included the one I was concerned with - within a week or so.

The recent reports with the recent versions of Thunar bother me. It seems to be a work-in-progress, in that there are several patches that have been submitted(?). I assume that things will be completely fixed at some point after one of the patches is chosen (or a different one is written) which works for all users in all situations. In the meantime, those who can compile can apply their own patch(es). I never bothered to learn how to do that. I suppose that I could easily enough... I'd just rather not have to bother :roll: .

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MDM
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Re: Linux Mint 18 codenamed “Sarah”

Post by _John »

JosephM wrote:Banshee is becoming a problem. There have been a few reports of people having issues with it and it no longer seems very well maintained. I wouldn't be surprised to see Mint with a different default player once something that fits the proper needs is found.
Hmm I see, although aside from this one little creepy thing that I can't even directly blame on Banshee with 100% certainty, I haven't had any problems with it yet :wink:
Banshee has become a problem.....
its now very unstable and also no longer properly maintained.

I would be grateful if someone could tell me if there is another player outthere that saves the playcount to the ID3 tag - the only reason I still use Banshee

thanks
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