Mint Update Killed Fresh Mint Install

[cmost]

It's always easy to blame the operating system when a failure of this sort occurs. That would make sense if everyone who owned a Dell experienced this problem but since that's not the case, it's obviously a problem with your specific machine and/or combination of updates. It seems an errant update interrupted the installation of all the updates and ultimately caused your problem because you a mess of half-updated packages. In any case, you should not blame Mint outright. Here's what you should do. First, reinstall Mint. Then, rather than trying to use a GUI tool (a relatively new one at that) use the command line so that you can monitor more easily what's happening. Open a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

repeat until no new upgrades are listed.

Then type:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

repeat until no new upgrades are listed.

This will ensure you have a clean, up-to-date system. Thereafter, you may use Mintupdate to install any additional updates that should become available. Good luck.

[Robinjives]

I installed Mint 4.0 on my Dell E520 tonight. Got through that okay. The system was running. But when I tried to do the indicated 100+ software updates, the installation process froze on starting cupsd. And that's all she wrote. I can boot, and I can get past the login screen, either as a user or as root, but then the system just stops dead. All I get is a black screen. Using recovery mode doesn't do anything different. Anyone have any ideas?

The ndiswrapper script also failed when I used it to try to install my Zyxel G-202 USB wireless device. It would run, and allow me to select the appropriate .inf file, but when I pressed the install button absolutely nothing would happen.

Too bad. I like the looks of the Mint distro. But if it fails on a basic Dell desktop machine, I think I'm going to be a bit hesitant to put it on my other machines.

Hi there,
Do not try to install the windows drivers with the ndiswrapper in GUI mode, I tried the same (for simplicity sake) and it sucked, instead try using the same with the console:
ndiswrapper -i <drivername> (if that command doensnt work try the same command with sudo)

Tat took care of the driver installation problem for me.