I have this laptop in front of me that is still on 20.1 and I am trying to get it upgraded to latest.

This is such a pain, but I show you how I worked around it.

The GUI stuff all doesnt work. The update manager always warns about errors with mirrors, even though apt works normally. Clicking on “change mirrors” launched a password prompt but it didnt fix anything. The “package repositories” app didnt launch at all, also not from the settings.

The mintupgrade tool is not available in these repos.

Updates

Problems:

  • mintupgrade not even in the repos
  • updates are separated into “normal” and “full” updates. Really confusing, coming from Fedora
# clean up the system to make stuff quicker
sudo apt uninstall --purge#as many packages as I didnt need
sudo apt autoremove --purge

# normal updates
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y


# system upgrade to latest. Dont get the logic and the difference behind these commands
sudo apt full-upgrade -y
sudo apt dist-upgrade -y

# you should at least reboot if there was a kernel upgrade
systemctl reboot

This got me to 20.3 at least.

Went into /etc/apt/sources.list and saw that this is empty. But in sources.list.d was a single file official-package-repositories.list that had all the sources. If you use a single file, why not just use sources.list??

Distro version upgrades

Problems:

  • you need to know the next underlying Ubuntu version
  • you need to know the codenames of target mint AND ubuntu version
  • you need to change a file in an unexpected location

I did it manually: search on the internet for the codenames of both latest Mint (virginia) and the underlying Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (jammy).

So I went in there and just replaced the names with the new correct ones. Forgot the old names, was it disco and una? The automated command would be:

# update Ubuntu names
sudo sed -i 's/disco/jammy/g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list

# update LM versions
sudo sed -i 's/una/virginia/g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list

Then opened a terminal and repeated the above.

This took forever, and when I came back today the mint session had crashed and the error window didnt respond.

I exited to TTY (Ctrl+Alt+F4) and repeated the above. Package casper had conflicts. Never heard of it so tried sudo apt remove casper and it didnt try to uninstall my whole desktop (cough should have done that LTT) so I just removed it. Lol?

Repeated the steps, finished with a reboot and it worked. I am now on 21.3

Post version upgrade

Problems:

  • mints updater is kinda iffy
  • on stable distros, automatic updates should be no problem
  • unattended-upgrades needs to be installed and set up in a very traditional way

First thing I did was

sudo apt install mintupgrade nala fish unattended-upgrades -y
sudo nala upgrade

Nala is poorly pretty bloated and uses tons of python stuff, but it is way more legible and user-friendly than apt, automating tons of stuff. It does not work in non-scrolling TTYs!

Fish is a way friendlier shell but dont set it as your default! It is not POSIX compliant and will give random breakages.

The unattended upgrades are very useful. To configure them, edit this file:

sudoedit /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades

And uncomment as many as you want.

Luckily this is not my main machine, I can recommend Fedora Atomic Desktops to anyone. I have no idea how this is supposed to be user friendly 😅

Cheers!

  • SmokeInFogEnglish
    41·
    6 months ago

    If it told you that your mirrors wouldn’t work for the task that you were trying to accomplish, then why didn’t you change them? It probably would’ve worked if you would’ve just listened to what the application was telling you. I’ve used the upgrade tool ever since it came out and have not had an issue with it.

    • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.netOP
      3·
      6 months ago

      Forgot to add. I obviously tried to open the “software sources” window and clicked the “change mirrors” button a couple of times without any result. The window didnt open at all, the button didnt do anything.

  • fpslem@lemmy.world
    2·
    6 months ago

    Glad I’m not the only one having trouble, my LMDE is less than 90 days from end-of-support, and the mintupgrade tool isn’t working for me. At my skill level, I’ve resigned myself to doing a fresh install, but it’s very frustrating. I typically use Mint because I don’t want to have to do that level of configuration and legwork, and it’s a bit off-putting.

    • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.netOP
      3·
      6 months ago

      Please look at my post. (Well this is my post lol) I hope you didnt already reinstall. It is pretty easy. I can add command-by-command or even automated instructions.

      I basically gave all the exact commands to run, so try it if not already reinstalled.

      • fpslem@lemmy.world
        2·
        6 months ago

        I haven’t yet, I will try to follow your process and see if it works.

        It is really weird to have a distro that is so mature and competent at just about everything else, and then it just doesn’t upgrade at all. I had an older family member on Mint a few years ago and they were very happy with it, but they ran into trouble on the upgrade, and after it went past the service period and they go stuck on older versions of Firefox, etc., they gave up and went back to Windows.

        • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.netOP
          1·
          4 months ago

          The whole traditional update/upgrade thing is completely strange.

          On Fedora Atomic, just like on Android, you have one update, you do it, you are there.

          If you want to do a version upgrade you rebase (basically a single but bigger update), and using a :latest image will even do this automatically with a normal update.

          The system where you always need to reboot ironically just always needs a single reboot, while traditional systems often make me reboot 3 times to complete that junk.

    • boredsquirrel@slrpnk.netOP
      1·
      6 months ago

      That is some random outdated version (19, not 20) and it advises to just change the repo without anything beforehand.

      This is not good as the upgrades from some random current repos version to the new one is not stable.

      You need to incrementally first to all the upgrades and then. (This is how a Debian upgrade works, it is also “what the hell, people are uses to this?” painful).

      But yes I also got this mintupgrade installed, but that didnt do anything as it already had the entire upgrade.