Tricky upgrade path to Gutsy…

Gutsy should be released tomorrow and we will be looking at a brand new Ubuntu. A lot of great innovations have been implemented by the Ubuntu developers and a lot of new software made it to their repository. Gnome 2.20, OpenOffice 2.3 and Thunderbird 2.0 for instance are among them.

The Mint developers also put a lot of efforts into modernizing their tools.

MintInstall and MintDesktop should come with significant changes.  MintUpdate is ready and should be included in Daryna. And finally, innovations that were put into Celena will be ported to Daryna as well, this includes for instance mintAssistant and mintUpload.

Development on Daryna itself begun and the upgrade path to Gutsy proved very tricky.

Based on the 7.10 RC release the team didn’t manage to get a stable system yet.  Users are recommended to avoid upgrades to Gutsy. Among other known issues Firefox and Gdebi stop working… and sudo causes problems.

With Gutsy final being released tomorrow Daryna should become usable in the days to come and we should expect a BETA release soon enough.

The challenge for the Mint team will be the upgrade path which will  eventually determine whether it’s possible to upgrade from Celena to Daryna and whether Mint still uses Ubuntu to produce the liveCDs or start generating its own.

In brief.. things look very promising but there are still a few uncertainties.

3 comments

  1. Interesting.

    I fresh installed Celena and then used synaptic to add update manager.
    I then ran gksu update-manage -d and upgraded successfully to what I affectionately call Minty Gibbon.

    Firefox still works, albeit a small issue with the dict used for spellchecking causing it to crash.

    Everything else still seems fine.

    J

  2. The problem with the spellchecker in Firefox is a libhunspell problem. It took me a week to figure it out and it has to do with the version of libhunspell on gutsy as opposed to the version of ff in mint(celena) The version of libhunspell in gutsy requires ff 2.0.0.8 as far as i remember FF 2.0.0.6 is in celena.. this causes libhunspell to interperet the space bar character as an unrecognized character and crash Ff. if you just want to change libhunspell you run into all knds of problems with other background libraries.. i had to revert to straight gutsy, i.e remove all the mint software and repositories.. your milage may vary.
    .

  3. Mint Team

    I made the decision to switch from Ubuntu to Mint with Cassandra and have been a happy camper since enjoying the benefits of both streams.

    I haven’t taken the plunge to migrate to Celena for two reasons a) desire to wait for Gutsy to support the base for Daryna, and b) unclear (to me anyway) upgrade path descriptions or instructions (maybe a “How to” would help) from Celena. So I voted for the safe rather than sorry route.

    Whilst I can do a clean install fairly easily I don’t want to because I will loose my customised settings, bookmarks, cookies & passwords, and email account/extension/address book details. Not to mention the specific package installs that I’ve added.

    Have missed the details on how to deal with these issues ? If not may I ask the community to consider ways to help users like me so that we can continue to remain devotees ?

    Many thanks for the great work and distro!
    Garoid

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