Determining Mint version

Quick to answer questions about finding your way around Linux Mint as a new user.
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Curious George

Determining Mint version

Post by Curious George »

How does one determine (from the command line) the version of Linux Mint being run? Entering "cat /proc/version" on my system gives

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Linux version 4.4.0-21-generic (buildd@lgw01-06) (gcc version 5.3.1 20160413 (Ubuntu 5.3.1-14ubuntu2) ) #37-Ubuntu SMP Mon Apr 18 18:34:49 UTC 2016
.

Pretty sure this is Mint 18; it was installed November 2016 and upgraded Jan 2017. But where is this information available on the system?
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xenopeek
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Re: Determining Mint version

Post by xenopeek »

You can use the command inxi -S to find the distro release version. inxi is a system information tool that can quickly get you many different types of information about your system.
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Curious George

Re: Determining Mint version

Post by Curious George »

Should have looked further down in the forum before posting. It looks like

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cat ~/doc/log/mint18:$ cat /etc/*-release
will give this information. Mine shows

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DISTRIB_ID=LinuxMint
DISTRIB_RELEASE=18
DISTRIB_CODENAME=sarah
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Linux Mint 18 Sarah"
Does this mean I'm running 18.0 and not 18.1 ?

thanks
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xenopeek
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Re: Determining Mint version

Post by xenopeek »

It would appear so. Open Update Manager, click Refresh to update it and if you're not told to update mintupdate itself open the Edit menu and see if the option to upgrade to Linux Mint 18.1 is there. If the option is there you indeed have Linux Mint 18 and if you want you can follow the considerations and steps in http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3185 to upgrade to 18.1
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Curious George

ue

Post by Curious George »

Thanks to xenopeek for suggesting "inxi -S" (with a capital S) to get version number; this works. Also the file /etc/linuxmint/info gives version information.

xenopeek also suggested:
Open Update Manager, click Refresh to update it and if you're not told to update mintupdate itself open the Edit menu and see if the option to upgrade to Linux Mint 18.1 is there.
.
An option to upgrade to Linux Mint 18.1 does indeed appear when opening Update Manager\Edit; apparently I'm still on 18.0.

Question: Ran "sudo aptitude update" followed by "sudo aptitude upgrade" on both 19-Jan and 25-Jan, and apparently this did not effect a change to 18.1. Is a different set of commands required?
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xenopeek
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Re: Determining Mint version

Post by xenopeek »

There is no single command to upgrade from 18 to 18.1. It involves editing software repository configuration, selectively changing certain other files and transitioning certain packages (removing one and installing a replacement). It is not trivial to do that by hand.

apt upgrade just upgrades all packages with available security upgrades.
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Rillian

Re: Determining Mint version

Post by Rillian »

Use Ctrl+Alt+F1 to go to a virtual terminal you should see:

------------Linux Mint [version number]

login:

Something like that.

To go back use Ctrl+Alt+F7.
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sdcphoneguy
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Re: Determining Mint version

Post by sdcphoneguy »

I am running Mint 18.1. I appreciate finding out about the inxi command in terminal.
the -s key didn't give me the version but (inxi -b) gave me everything including the distro.
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