Newbie upgrade disaster

[ocmac]

Hi, Linux Mint user for~1.5 years, on a dell latittude D620 and had 10.10 working perfectly, but obviously that's not supported anymore. Tried to upgrade to 11.04 using apt-get by changin repositories to natty in software manager, did not work, gave me a laptop with no working keyboard or trackpad, and a fugly X-11 style interface. I got the keyboard and trackpad back by reinstalling old libdev packages, but am stuck with the "Ubuntu classic" or plain Gnome desktop, which gives me a terrible user interface, no compiz etc. And of course, everything is still 10.10. There is no Linux Mint session option that I can see.

I current plan to get back to my perfectly working state is to detach my XP xpi file from virtual box (which I need for work only) and do a fresh install 12 or 13....or is there another way?

[MrBob22]

First, I suggest reading the tutorial on upgrade:
http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2

My main point here is back up your data.

If you installed Mint 10 from a DVD, you might be able to restore from the disk (but I dont recall the details.) I had a redo on Mint 11 similar but eventually installed 12 with a fresh install (and not ready to go to 13 yet since 12 works great.)

IF YOU HAVE backed up your data, a clean install of the newer system is a good approach (IMHO). Look at the release notes to see if any of the known issues affect your system. Also, you could burn a DVD for live Mint 13 and see if it goes ok on your laptop before doing the direct install on your hard drive.

Good luck,
MrBob22

[robw]

I'd go with a fresh install of 13. I've been using LM for some 5 years now. 10 was great but I found 11 a bit buggy and 12 was the same (neither of which was LM's fault!). 13 is good, with very few glitches and I've installed MATE, Cinnamon and KDE versions on the family's machines with no problems so far. Not sure if it still does, but previous versions of LM always recommended the fresh upgrade method and its what I always do. As Mr Bob says, a good backup is essential (including hidden files) but I've always found it easy and failsafe. For info, Cinnamon continues the Gnome format and usability and does so with polish - I'd say LM13/Cinnamon was an excellent successor to LM10 (Mate is also good, of course, but Cinnamon takes the polish further than Gnome ever did, assuming your machine is reasonably modern.

[ocmac]

Thanks for replies, I've decided to do a fresh install of Mint 13, not sure how well it will run on my older core duo laptop, but the extended support till 2017 is very appealing.

I will definitely back up my data, including hidden files.