Warnings:
- This upgrade path is for the Main and Universal Edition only, from a Mint 7 Gloria system to a Mint 8 Helena system.
- There is no guarantee that it will work for you. In fact this is quite a risky process. If you’re experienced and if you know how to troubleshoot and solve common Linux problems (in particular X11, kernel modules and APT problems) then you’re probably OK. If you’re a novice user we recommend you perform a fresh installation of Linux Mint 8 instead.
- You should make backups of all your data before upgrading.
Upgrading vs a fresh install:
The recommended way to install Linux Mint 8 is to download and burn the liveCD. Another alternative is to upgrade your existing system as detailed in this blog post. Note that we do not recommend you to do this and we insist on the fact that you know the pros and cons associated with it and the risks involved in doing so.
Pros:
- With an upgrade, you keep the software you previously installed, you don’t need to reinstall it again as you would after a fresh installation of Linux Mint.
- With an upgrade, you keep your settings and your documents, you don’t need to restore them from a backup. Note that you can also do this with a fresh installation by using a dedicated home partition and that no matter which way you’re upgrading or performing a fresh installation, you should ALWAYS make a backup of your personal data.
Cons:
- Upgrading is slow, because you need to download the new versions of all the packages. In comparison, the liveCD contains about 2.5GB of compressed data in a single download of less than 700MB and the fresh installation takes between 10 and 15 minutes. Consequently, it’s much faster to perform a fresh installation of Linux Mint than upgrading your existing one.
- Depending on what’s installed in your system, package upgrades can trigger complicated conflicts. If you’re experienced with APT you’ll probably know how to solve the problem. If you’re not, you could end up half-way between Mint 7 and Mint 8, and if you’re unlucky even with an unusable system.
- There’s a code-freeze before Ubuntu gets released, and then testing goes on. The same happens with the Linux Mint release, and so what you end up running when you perform a fresh installation is a system that is known to us for its statibility and which has been thouroughly tested. An upgrade applies all available package updates no matter how unsafe they are, from level 1 to level 5, so if there are regressions in these updates you’ll get your system impacted by them.
- With every new kernel, there are differences related to hardware support. To know if your hardware is fully recognized by the new Linux Mint release you should try out the liveCD and check that things work before making the decision to install or to update your system. There are have been numerous people saying that their wireless cards, their sound device or some other part of their system was recognized with the prior version of Linux Mint or Ubuntu and didn’t work as expected anymore. For some people, the latest release isn’t necessarily the right one. It’s better to be safe than sorry, so if you’re going to download the liveCD to check your hardware support anyway, you may as well go for a fresh install and avoid downloading things twice.
Comparison with Ubuntu:
- Upgrading Ubuntu is not safer than upgrading Linux Mint. It’s equally risky.
- Ubuntu doesn’t mention the risks involved in package and release upgrades. Their policy is to fix whatever gets broken and to assume that the regressions caused on your system will get solved by future upgrades.
- Linux Mint insists on these risks and recommends a prudent approach to upgrades. Our policy is to avoid possible regressions by being selective on the updates we recommend to you.
- Upgrading Ubuntu is easy, and easier than upgrading Linux Mint. It shouldn’t be though, and if there’s any risk involved in you braking your system, then the least we can do is to write a long boring post about it, to make you think twice about doing it, and to throw warning signs at you before you click on the shiny button 🙂
Upgrading graphically (easier):
- Open a terminal and type the following commands: “apt update” and “apt install mint-upgrade-tool-main”
- Open mintMenu and run “Menu->Administration->Upgrade to Linux Mint 8″
- Follow the instructions.
- If asked, always choose “Replace”.
- If asked, always choose “I”.
- Ignore errors related to broken packages (in particular with mint-artwork packages)
- When finished, reboot the computer.
- Change your wallpaper to “Fresh” and your theme to “Shiki-Wise”
- Run the upgrade tool from the menu again, ignore errors related to broken packages and let the upgrade tool finish all the way to the end.
Upgrading from the command line (faster):
Open a terminal and type the following commands:
- gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list (Change all occurrences of “gloria” to “helena”, and all occurences of “jaunty” to “karmic”, remove the lines for the Community section of the Linux Mint repository, then save the file and close the editor)
- apt update
- apt install mint-info-main (choose “Y” or “I” to install the package maintainer’s version)
- apt install mint-meta-main(choose “Y” or “I” to install the package maintainer’s version)
In the terminal, repeat the following commands until both upgrade commands show no upgrades available:
- apt upgrade
- apt dist-upgrade
- apt install mint-meta-main
Give us your feedback:
[poll id=”8″]
Troubleshooting:
Firefox:
If after the upgrade your Firefox installation stills shows up as “Shiretoko” or if the search engines aren’t working, try the following commands:
- apt remove firefox-3.0 firefox-3.0-branding
- apt remove firefox-3.5
- apt clean
- apt install moonlight-plugin-mozilla
- apt install mint-meta-main
mintMenu:
If the menu is empty and you can’t see any applications, right click on the menu button in the panel and select “Reload plugins”.
Clem,
gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list (Change all occurrences of “felicia” to “gloria”, and all occurences of “intrepid” to “jaunty”
Am I in error by thinking that should be gloria to helena, and jaunty to karmic?
– Justin
Thanks 🙂
Lol everyone votes the first (so far 11 voters)
I tried the upgrade from v6 to v7. It worked, but things didn’t run very well. A later fresh install of v7 left things in much better shape. So my decision now is not rather to upgrade or fresh install, it is fresh install (including re-installing and re-configuring everything) or keep running v7. It is the strength and usefulness (to me) of the updates and improvements in Mint, Ubuntu, and all of the downstream products that helps me decide. v7 was a nice improvement over v6, and I’m very happy with my decision to fresh install.
We’ll see.
Everyone votes the first, because the installation of the system is very fast and easy:) If you have a separate /home partition just install any additional programs.
Hi Clem and team,
Upgrade is still running as I type, but I notice that /etc/issue.net and /etc/lsb-release show Ubuntu 9.10 and not Mint 8. Not a major problem of course…
Will be sure to give feedback when complete. Thanks for everything.
mycroft: That’s ok, these will get overwritten with Mint values before the end of the upgrade.
arabic translation for this article is available on :
http://linuxm-ar.blogspot.com/2009/11/7-8.html 🙂
Well, this is bad news for me. I had no idea that upgrading was so risky. For me, upgrading was one of the biggest PROS of Linux over Windows.
There is always a lot of tweaking involved in setting up your system to your own taste, installations from different sources and with procedures that I don’t remember anymore.
I like to think that, for the majority of us no-geeks, the best OS is the OS that wastes less of my time. After all, the OS is not the productive part of the system, the applications are.
I am sorry to learn this, but I appreciate that Clem exposes the not-so-shiny side. I still love Mint.
I think the instruction are for 32 bit OS.
OK, graphical upgrade complete and all seems OK, apart from having to set up my printers again. I did take the precaution of running the rc last week as a live usb, so wasn’t expecting any major hardware issues. Yes, I know I should have a partition for /home, but I didn’t fully appreciate the value of that when I originally installed Daryna. Have upgraded every release since without major problems. Born lucky I guess 🙂
Thanks again for a great distro.
I am out of blank CDs or DVDs so am doing upgrade in terminal now. Don’t really care what happens because have my hard drive backed up on a fat partition and will simply burn gloria back on if problem occurs.
José, upgrading ANY operating system is risky. It’s just a very complex task because there’s no tool to identify all potential issues with software installed after a clean setup. However, I upgraded from Elyssa to Felicia and then to Gloria on one of my computers. That’s two upgrades in a row. I had some minor inconveniences which I was able to overcome – although I’m not an expert with Linux -, but altogether I can say Mint’s developers did an excellent job with the upgrade tool.
Of course, anyone who doesn’t want to adventure should copy or use Mint Backup to temporarily store data somewhere else, perform a clean Mint install and restore the backup.
It’s good to know Helena is near launch. 🙂 I’m eager to play with it as soon as it gets out there. 😉
By the way, the poll isn’t accurate: all positives summed up give 101%
It’s OK now, but after I voted it displayed a “-1%” for the last poll option and the >0% ones summed up to 101%. Oh well… Let’s hope this will be our biggest problem related to Helena. 😀
I have noticed, with the live CDs, both Ubuntu 9.10 and Mint 8 RC1, which have the same kernel, that my Labtec wireless keyboard and mouse kit (Media Wireless Desktop 800) freezes, leading to mistakes when writting or pointing some button in a window.
I assume that this is due to the new kernel (2.6.31 series) that, instead to fully recognize my peripherals as the old one (2.6.28 series) did, is not able to perform as I wanted.
For this reason I am not going to upgrade to the Mint Helena version. I still preffer the Mint Gloria version.
Il vostro aggiornamento si e bloccato quasi alla fine
GRRRRR!!!!
@Jose. Keep in mind that an apples to apples comparison for the Windows world would be upgrading from Vista to 7 from *within* Vista. I’ve upgraded many times previously (Mint and Ubuntu) with mixed results and will attempt the upgrade path for my home PC, but a fresh install for my work PC.
If anyone does not currently have a custom partition structure, now is a GREAT time to think about doing that. It will make future upgrades much less risky. At a minimum, a seperate /home partition is recommended.
Something is wrong with the NVIDIA X Server Settings in Mint 8. It wouldn’t save the screen resolution. I had to do this to fix it:
sudo nvidia-xconfig –add-argb-glx-visuals –composite
then
sudo nvidia-settings
Then choose my settings. It finally saved afterwards.
Also, for some reason, I couldn’t rename/change the labels my drives. :/
Woohoo! I just upgraded with some minor issues that I managed to solve ^_^ Mint Team – you are great!
Good to see that the 32-bit is out. It looks good.
I am waiting for the 64-bit Helena to come out before upgrading.
I spoke too soon – since upgrading I’ve lost the ability to connect to the shares on my win 2000 box. In nautilus I can see the shared folders but no longer mount them. Any clues?
I had ubuntu jaunty and upgraded to karmic and it broke my handbrake, so i tried mint to test it and i like the change in some of the features and have noticed that handbrake seems to run a bit faster. i wonder though that since the new mint is based on karmic, if it’ll brake my handbrake too?
I am only 13(but quite a geek(: and this was quite easy acutully. my only problem was that my moniter only supports 600X800 resolution, and now I can’t see the boot up process or the login manager. I can still sign in(just by typing my user name and password when I see the hard disk light calm down), but it is kind of nice to be able to see these things. I also can not hear anything. When I originally installed Mint 7 the sound worked fine. A few days ago it stopped working, I know it is not hardware failure becuase the sound on my Windows partion is fine. I thought upgrading to mint 8 might set the sound back to the defualts, but I was wrong. is anything I can type into the terminal to make this happen?
Thanks, Zachary Senn.
“I do not fear computers, I fear the lack of them.” Isaac Asimov
Clem and Team, I upgrade from mint 7 to 8 via terminal . All is well in mint land with the exception that I get a broken package error when applying the “apt install mint-meta-main” command. Any clues? Other than that things are minty.
“The following packages have unmet dependencies:
mint-meta-main: Depends: sun-java6-plugin but it is not going to be installed
E: Broken packages”
Thanks Clem and Mint Team.
Neil
I upgraded from 7 to 8, it’s all ok for now, except for “usplash” process that is always 100% cpu. why?
“The following packages have unmet dependencies:
mint-meta-main: Depends: sun-java6-plugin but it is not going to be installed
E: Broken packages”
Same story: sun-java6-plugin: depends on sun-java6-bin (= 6-15-1) bot only 6-16-0ubuntu1.9.04 can be installed (in fact it is installed)
I don’t know wether it is connected with this, but I’m unable to change the wallpaper. Despite choosing a wallpaper, only a black canvas can be seen.
i did the update through gui. everything went fine except now my wireless card doesn’t work. it should work as it did before and it did using ubuntu 9.4 and 9.1 don’t know how to get a driver installed for it.
I just love linux mint 8! The install was very easy, Keep up the Good Work
“I prefer to wait for the release.”
Because I want everything to be fresh and new.^^
awaiting the linux mint 8 x64 version before upgrading
Clem says to make a backup before updating — so should I use Mint Backup? Will that backup my HOME directory and hidden files? Or should I use Clonezilla to backup the partition (I use the entire drive)? Or should I simply right-click the HOME icon on the desktop and click Create Archive?
I’d hate to lose my setting and installed software in rock-solid Gloria.
GUI upgrade went well, broken artwork pkg , wireless works
This post doesn’t apply to my kubuntu, but I like your post. It is very full of useful hint for ubuntu based distro!
Hi everybody,
I cancelled update when following commands fail :
apt install mint-info-main # error with “/var/…/info”
apt install mint-meta-main # lake of depedencies (?)
Now waiting further informations about update.
All thinks are Ok except the package broken ( sun-java6-plugin ) exactly like NeilM said before …
What should i have to do ?
Great work devs .. in all other machines i start from zero and everything works great since 10 days ago (RC1)
:o))
The step at `apt install mint-meta-main’ also installs KDE packages 🙁 What happens? What packages should I remove after the upgrade progress is completed?
how i can change the Login Window theme? I have Theme problems after dist-upgrade
Same problem than mnyary and NeilM !
Instead of trying to do a LM7 to LM8 upgrade, I simply installed LM8RC and then ran all the updates. I keep Mint configured so it takes less than 10 minutes to have it ready for a clean install by keeping all of my important information on a separate, 1TB drive.
You know what, my system after upgrade is a greatest system I’ve ever used. Thank you!
Upgraded… now cursor pad does not work on my HP laptop, so I’m dead in the water? Thoughts on how to get it workings so I can use my machine again?
Hi there,
I tested it with x64 with command line updating.
It worked withouth any problems except that I had to change mint-info-main mint-meta-main to mint-info-x64 and mint-meta-x64.
Regards,
Upgraded last night from Gloria to Helena via GUI. I have to say I am impressed. I have been using Mint since Felicia but did clean install to go to Gloria. The upgrade process was simple and effective. I had to reinstall avant navigator and my external hard drive now shows up as just symbols as the name of the disk on the desktop. Other than that I like what I’m seeing so far. The overall feel seems much cleaner and refined, which I thought wouldn’t be possible to achieve after a great release in Gloria. Keep up the good work Clem and crew!!!
Hey,
upgraded by mint update tool.
Can’t establish a connection to my dsl modem with my desktop pc.Hope network connection can be established (atm no working router there 🙁 ). Any ideas?
Somehow it installed me an Irish keyboard layout. Wondered where my pipe key has gone 🙂
Anyways nicely done. Got anything else working pretty fine.
regards
Sebastian
Just upgrade via terminal. All smooth 🙂
Just upgraded using the GUI version. Its very slow took me about 2 and a half hours mostly cause download speeds were horrible (to many ppl dl on thanksgiving ???)
Very impressed no problems reported so far
Thanks Clem and the rest of the team
On my laptop I use Arch linux for it’s rolling release system. Much easier upgrades. Currently upgrading to mint 8 on my desktop.. There was some issua with libsubtitleeditor, but I think I got over it. Also I have a constant problem with too small /boot.. Hope I’ll have enough time to solve it somewhere in the future. For now the update seems to go quite well, thanks for your work 🙂
Mint is definitely the best option for everyday use.
I did a backup of my home directory (just in case) and followed the GUI instructions to the letter and upgraded to Mint 8.
WOW – no problems whatsoever. Sound, Nvidia drivers, bookmarks in the new Firefox and Chrome were there. Wifi Broadcom works, touchpad, etc etc.
2 things missing —- It couldn’t work with my MythTV install on the laptop so it removed it and my CUPS network printer settings are gone.
All in all, it’s a great update and the work involved is incredible!!
Thanks to all that works so hard for us…
Used the GUI method to upgrade from Gloria to Helena. A few hiccups with graphics (my desktop machine’s drivers are nearly all Intel), waiting to see if they’ll settle down or not. Oddly, icons are not displaying properly, showing only the default Gnome icons and Gnome-Wise icons, but no others – no others of the pre-installed icon sets (Human, Mint), and definitely not any imported icon sets. Neither the graphics nor icons were an issue under a fresh install of Helena.
To resolve the Java issue, remove and reinstall Java. It will say it removes Mozilla as well, but this is easily restored. I ran into some odd issues as well, but I wanted to see what it was like. Again, I highly recommend to place all important files on separate partitions so that a fresh install of the OS is painless.
Upgrading from RC1 to Stable on my laptop was smooth and painless.
I guess we can use mintBackup too to backup/restore the data and make a fresh install. So bad that you have to select all the hidden directories one by one.
Um… am i missing something or isn’t there a definite release date for Helena anywhere? Seems as if Menelaos can’t let her go 🙂
I haved no problems to upgrade from Gloria to Helena. I’m upgrading from the command line.
Regards from Germany,
Kurt Marquardt
I always have separate partitions / and /home, and also I make backups of the interesting stuff.
Well, I made a GUI upgrade following your instructions and I’m really impressed and, of course, happy to have Helena running fine:
The only problems I get after upgrading was Bind9, probably due to a my misconfiguration, and the pulse audio. Now I don’t have audio, but probably due to an old card. Other problem I found is the configuration of the MintMenu, where the favourites items has lost. Well a minor problem.
So I only can congratulate to all the team for this good work.
Thanks a lot!
One small problem with me is that of the gnome-terminal, it became mono color (black on white), and no fortune & cowsays. I’ve copied the /etc/bash.bashrc from RC1 liveCD (from a VirtualBox), and everything now in a perfect state.
Dear Sirs, formerly i had the System “Vista Home Premium”.
I am interested in Linux Systems and tried therefore several Iso-CD’s
In this way, i like especially Linux Mint 7, because it looks well and works properly.
So that i hat the desire to install the new edition Linux Mint 8 Helena on my PC.
First i tried to install Linux Mint in additon to Vista.
But this didn’t work and i had to formatire my system and
installed Linux Mint 8 Helena instead.I am very happy with it,
So i wish to thank you for this very good System.
With the “Wine” System i was also able to install most of my favoured Windows Programms.
I wish to thank you for this very good PC-System.
Also the Linux-Forums are very interesting.
Wiht many Greetings from Germany
Wilfried Hankel
After the upgrade everything work’s fine, than you very much, this is the system, which I was looking for.
“The following packages have unmet dependencies:
mint-meta-main: Depends: sun-java6-plugin but it is not going to be installed
E: Broken packages”
My system is mostly updated, but this error stopped me fixing the Shiretoko problem.
Adding to #48 everything works now after reinstalling java.
thank you for your great work.
Thanks for being honest about upgrading. I upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu 9.10 and it’s useless to me now as the screen resolution is to small and they have yet to come up with an easy fix!
I will be keeping Mint 7 until 8 is bulletproof as everything works fine on my desktop…
Hi,
Congratulation for this work. Just one question : do you know when the x64 iso will be available ? (probably next month)
Bye 🙂
I thought I would try the GUI upgrade, but got a terminal message saying that the package mint-upgrade-tool-main could not be found. Perhaps this is because I have the 64-bit edition of Gloria installed and the equivalent edition of Helena is not yet available?
I am currently dual booting Win XP Pro and Gloria on a Panasonic CF-28 Toughbook with an 800 mgz P-III processor and 760mb of ram.
I chose the graphical upgrade path everything went fine until I lost my wireless connection (Use a wired connection if you decide to upgrade DUH). Nothing past open office core was not downloaded.
The upgrade was sucessful and the rest of the packages were downloaded once I had a wired connection plugged in.
I had only two issues that I know of:
1. I had to enter my win xp info in the grub menu list so I could boot into windows
2. My wireless ability was broken but after some trial and error I will eventually get it fixed
I wanted to do the upgrade and report on the results because this is the only way to improve this process to make the upgrade process better and more user friendly.
Great Job on Mint 8
Hello Mint users! Just upgraded to mint 8 by console (Laptop HP Compaq 8510w, dual core). Everything worked fine until the end when the system crashed (after the kernel installation). However a restart of the computer showed very interesting: Xubuntu wallpaper. Then I realized that one have to block in the source.list the ppa, debichem and others repositories which we possible used some time. Even better is to uninstall all applications fron these repositories. Now it’s OK, including the Sun VirtualBox, except the quite ugly fonts in firefox, but still on working. Overall: a very good job! Thanks Clem and The Linux Mint Team!
Thanks for the concise instructions.
I just performed a smooth upgrade from Gloria to Helena via command-line method.
One interesting thing is that my firefox had a couple of extra add-ons installed (Style manager + Ubuntu mod pack).
Not sure if I needed these so I disabled them and firefox still works fine.
Thanks to Team Mint!
up and running on a dell mini 9. I did need a hard wire to download wireless drivers. It’s very nice, now gotta wait another 6 months – thanks
I am also waiting for the 64-bit version. Hopefully the upgrade-path will be smooth. Thanks for the good work.
Groeten uit Nederland
Hi again, Teemu mentioned the ‘rolling releases’.
Read about it on Wikipedia. That seems the way to go! Would be perfect, a Linux with rolling releases and the user-friendliness of Linux Mint.
I would really love that!
Update to last post:
I used the windows wireless driver program and once I loaded my wireless card’s “inf” file I was good to go. So far I like it better than Gloria. I have not experienced the progressive degrading of the letters in the headers of the menu files that had been annoying me.
Thanks for the attention to detail.
Hi,
How do you uninstall older versions of Mint to do a fresh install of a new version?
Thanks
Mike in Palmer, Alaska
I did the graphical update from 7 to 8. Up to now, everything looks perfect.
Thanks, you guys!
Hi all,
Completed the upgrade overnight. Only issue I had was I had to add the dependancy moonlight-plugin-mozilla for the apt install mint-meta-main to work.
Hope that helps
K
🙂
to riversbooks:
Start installation of “new” mint8 and during installation delete old version of mint(format of disk) https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation
I tried earlier to upgrade and I broke my system. I just did an upgrade from Linux Mint 6 to 8 and everything seems to be working, I had a few problems with a couple of packages (broken dependencies, broken packages).
Thanks for all the effort. I’m quite sure this is a major improvement.
Especially for my Dell Mini 10. Thanks to this upgrade, I finally have video drivers that doesn’t crash my laptop every hour and I get the feeling my internal microphone will work on this version too with a little tweaking.
On the downside I experience some minor out-of-the-box inconveniences like the mint google in mint 6.
What’s with Gnome Do, the new login screen / wallpaper and Fortune?
I’m reading right now that uninstalling Fortune also uninstalls mintmenu, mint tools and and host of other mint programs. How in the world does an entire OS depend on an adage blabbering ASCII pinguin, Teddybear and Moose?
I liked the login screen of mint 7, this one looks ugly. Same goes for the startup screens. Where did the progress bar go? The wallpaper is so-so. The previous ones were better.
Anyway, good luck with your nex version guys!
upgraded 3 machines at the same time (desktop, netbook, notebook) only minor issues (moonlight-plugin-mozilla and appereance theme). On notebook after upgrade is synaptic crashing, but usable.
System seems snappier and faster.
sorry, I am new on linux mint, and I dont get it. it is Linux mint 8 final version already out? I wanna make fresh install and I don’t find the link to download the ISO. thanks for any information!
Ok so I managed to get the upgrade. Now at some point while on 7 I had installed ubuntu-desktop, I had a cool hybrid of the mint and ubuntu. Anyhow the upgrade was rough, It locked up midway through and then after I hard reset it, it would not boot, kept giving me a waiting for drive according to fstab. Fixed it by going to live cd and then chroot to the HD and then sudo dpkg –configure-a. Then after it still had issues, had to enter the terminal (shell) and do the same. Finally it came up but I had no Mint Menu. I get a error when I try to add it. I searched it but none of the answers have worked for me.
Here is the error:
The panel encountered a problem while loading: “OAFIID:GNOME_mintMenu”
hopefully I’ll figure this one out. so far 8 looks nice though. good work!
Update! Found by doing:
cd /usr/lib/linuxmint/mintMenu/
./mintMenu.py
That gnomeapplet is missing or incorect. I found it is in Python-gnomeapplet. Reinstalled and now I have a fully fuctional Mint 8… Thanks!
upps sorry, didnt read all the blog, just disregard my question!
I chose not to create a separate /home folder on my laptop since it’s only a 40 GB HDD, and I wasn’t sure how much space I needed for my OS. How much space do I need? Should 10 – 15 GB for system files suffice?
apt install mint-upgrade-tool-main
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
E: Couldn’t find package mint-upgrade-tool-main
???
upgrade 7 to 8 from terminal with only wireless prob on dell xps y – solved using mint forum – update source – nice job mint ..
Well, upgrade went smooth, and worked perfectly, and i must say, the mint team did a DAMN good job on helena. So far, i have encountered no bugs. The only problem is, when i did the upgrade, it installed linuxmint8, to a new partition! I have my storage drive where my music, movies, personal pics are all stored, and for some weird reason it was installed here. If anyone has an answer as to why, then please help me as to redirect it back to the other end of my hard drive, rather then in my storage.
*note* i cant do a fresh install, thus can only update from 7, to 8.
Currently upgrading from Gloria on my Dell Latitude laptop… so far so good. Let me clarify a few things for some that appear to be running into problems: 1st, only the 32bit version is available/upgradable… expect the 64bit version in about a month. 2nd, you’ll have better success if you have a more or less “plain vanilla” installation (no ppa repos, etc). I already have the 8RC on my main desktop and it works fabulously (no surprise!).
Mint continues to be my favorite distro, and I have tried ’em all (I currently have 24 distros installed and working). Keep up the fine work Clem and all others involved! Mint indeed brings freedom and elegance to even the least computer-savy user. It’s just great software.
The OPs on the Mint Help IRC channel are being ignorance and bullying.
They kicked out people when they think they are right. I was saying the name issue, not the Mint OS itself, I said “Mint is poison” which is true in real world, I don’t need to mention what I meant is all about the name, NOT the OS itself, and I got kicked out. It won’t hurt me but only one is getting hurt is Linux Mint because I was gonna make a big donation to the Linux Mint Team, now I don’t have the motivation to do it. I didn’t lose anything, I am still using Linux Mint OS, those arrogant people in IRC Mint Help Channel won’t do anything good to you.
Just a opinion. If ones can’t take a piece of opinion, it’s your fate, not mine.
A serious Mint User from Asia.
I upgraded my linux mint, got a few errors while proceeding but nothing major. After the reboot everything worked fine and i can’t figure out any bugs/errors at the moment.
Thank you for this great new version!
I have solved the dependencies problems of sun-java6-plugin mentionned in many posts by the use of aptitude instaed of apt. Aptitude gave me a solution to solve the problems.
After that everything is OK and Helena is very nice
I’m waiting for the fluxbox edition, if there’s going to be one.
I just upgraded from Gloria to Helena and everything seems okay. During the upgrade, there was an error when installing some Mint artwork, something having to do with broken packages. After rebooting and attempting apt dist-upgrade, everything is installed, and there are no broken packages.
All in all, it’s sweet. Of course, so was Mint 7, but there are obvious improvements. One thing though, the GDM login screen………the one in 7 was perfect. This one, assuming it was installed correctly during upgrade looks old. If anyone knows how to change that, do let me know.
Thanks.
I upgraded surprisingly easily, but there is one minor niggle. Some things in the menu are now in heirarchical subfolders, eg logic puzzles under Games and Picasa under Graphics. In the Mint Menu the subfolders aren’t visible. I had to go into Main Menu and copy the links back to the parent folders for them to show up.
Other than that, it worked remarkably well. Much less hastle than I had updrading from 5 to 6 or 6 to 7.
Awesome! I used the terminal commands and the update went smoothly.
I did have one slight hiccup. I had to fix firefox slightly, following the provided instructions.
Other than that I haven’t noticed any issues yet. Of course its early yet.
I don’t find the new wallpaper bad at all, but do prefer it at login rather than my default background, but easy to adjust it.
Great job Linux Mint!
This is my journey through the territory of linux to Mnt Helena. After several straight weeks of reinstalling XP, wasting time looking for viruses, and using overly vigorous rootkits which do as much harm as good! I decided to try linux Mint. It had been recommended by a friend. I installed it on another partition of the XP drive. Grub added windows, and I managed to add my OSX installation after a lot of googling! I also installed Linux Mint Gloria on my wife’s pc. After a long discussion in which I boasted that, by now, linux sported as good as or better than windows equivalent programs! She knows nothing about computers and oses! All she knows is Word, XL, QQ, IE, Fetion, Xunlei-Kankan (No.1 video streaming website in China), WMP and Photoshop. My wife is Chinese. But she was more than willing to try an alternative OS after so many problems with XP mostly because of QQ vulnerabilities. So I installed Mint and it found all her pc’s hardware without one single hiccup! Then I made the eye opening journey of discovery to find her precious programs for linux. Pidgin does have QQ but only minimal services. Luckily Tencent released Linux QQ 1.02 beta, which works fine although still not fully implemented. Then I managed to install QQ 2009, and better QQ 2008 using wine. I also found source code for Fetion (china mobile’s comprehensive chat client) which installed perfectly, thus I learned how to configure, compile and install. Open Office took care of XL and Word functions and more! I always use draw when preparing flash cards for class; it’s the quickest and most versatile program for the job! RhythmBox is a great music player though at first it lacked codecs! So I was happy to find VLC the ultimate media player also available for linux. Next problem was http://www.xunlei.com and it’s proprietary kankan installer, windows only! Kankan installer installed with wine however it couldn’t connect to the net to download it’s system. I need to learn how to tweak wine or progs for wine! WMP installed with wine and Photoshop installed from Wine-doors. In fact the only problem outstanding was the kankan installer. I had to find the workaround because of my manly pride! Eventually I came across VirtualBox by Sun Microsystems, authors of OpenOffice and Sun Java, and Solaris. I had used virtual pcs before and I knew that they were usually painfully slow, except Q on OSX which was fairly decent. So I installed Xp pro in a virtualbox and I hardly had to configure anything, internet worked, dvd’s mounted, sound OK! I installed kankan and pointed my browser to http://www.xunlei.com and soon we enjoyed top speed movie streams within linux. Wow! But I still installed antivirus software in VB XP, just in case! Still can’t get entirely away from windows! Two months later my wife has experienced zero problemos with linux mint! I on the other hand experienced several problemos with linux gloria, because I needed low latency for audio work (I’m an artiste!). I couldn’t get the audio system configured for my media activities for weeks! Jack had been a problematic because I had needed hw0 not hw0,1. Pulse audio, alsa audio, oss. In the end I learnt a lot about .asoundrc, about surround on linux, and patches, kernels and low-latency issues. On windows I used Cakewalk with wdm drivers and super low latency. Could linux match what I was used to? Finally I got Ardour to work with jack at 8 msec latency, not bad for a standard realtek ac97 chipset! In fact it was only when I installed the beta of Helena that I immediately had all these problems resolved by the new sound configuration utility. It was perfect! Then I discovered Ubuntu Studio karmic! Which is nice but a little bit less user friendly for ordinary activities, and the latency wasn’t any better than on Mint. But on 64 studio I acheived a stable working environment with a latency of 1.33 msec!!! ASTOUNDING! However with that distro I could not connect to the net even though it saw my hardware. Frustrating. So I wanted to import 64studio’s kernel, and whatever else gave it such low latency and incorporate that into Helena! Even though my Helena had installed in i386 mode. Work in progress. Helena had several problems on my system, most noteable was the mouse freezing all the time, but the reboot X-server ctrl^alt^backspace made it bearable. That and other problems have vanished with mint updates having been installed. My system is now upto date. Apart from continuing to improve on low latency in Helena I am also experimenting with boot toram, and ramdisks. For example, I created a ramdisk of 1.2gb, /mnt/rd mount point and I actually created a virtualbox XP installation on a virtual c: drive on/in the ram drive, because I thought it would speed things up. I am writing a icron script to automatically copy this c: drive to /mnt/rd when VB starts up and also to copy this c: drive back to disk when VB sends a term signal to XP, so that I don’t lose any installs or changes to the virtual c:drive. Wish me luck! Linux Mint Helena has changed our computing lives forever, there can be no going back! I am addicted….If only I could create a Helena puppy that would be delightful 😉
I just tried to upgrade. After I reboot the computer, the simple greeter desktop came up with no options to type user names or passwords. After a while, I tried to shut down the computer, and a window with this message appears: “gdm-simple-greeter.desktop not responding”.
So I’m stuck at this step. Did anybody have similar experience? And how did you fix it? Thank you.
I think I found a temporary fix to my problem (#98). I disabled user list with this command: sudo -u gdm gconftool-2 –set –type boolean /apps/gdm/simple-greeter/disable_user_list true
What should uname -a return after the upgrade? I get:
Linux linux-laptop 2.6.31-15-generic #50-Ubuntu SMP Tue Nov 10 14:54:29 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux
I would like to first say thanks to everyone for all the work they put in on this release and this great distro overall…. but please can we please have a 64bit edition out at the same time? what can i do to help make this happen?
Great directions and I had absolutely no troubles upgrading from Gloria to Helena. Linux Mint Rocks and so do you guys (developers)
Wasn’t too difficult. My upgrade required a little more work, but nothing terrible. The command line option is the best one for troubleshooting. Had to manually remove/reinstall some packages to force them to upgrade. In particular was sun-java6-* (for firefox issue) and the eclipse packages. Nothing a few moments of tinkering didn’t fix. Way to go Mint team!
Off to a poor start using command line, but am assuming that this just replaces the info file – I’ll manually change this:
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/mint-info-main_8.0.2_all.deb (–unpack):
trying to overwrite `/etc/linuxmint/info’, which is also in package mint-info-universal
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/mint-info-main_8.0.2_all.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
my laptop is not booting after upgrade, it says that none of the drives in /etc/fstab can be mounted and refuses to boot, asking if i want to start the recovery console. the only way i managed to get it to boot was by making the boot options as follows:
root=/dev/sda2 rw
completely removing the rest of the line.
I think this problem may have a lot to do with me forgetting to do “apt install mint-meta-main” while installing. if i chroot into the drive from the live cd can i repair it by running this part of the update? it is showing what other people in the forum are complaining about. some ubuntu guys say it is cause by the ‘mountall’ package.
So i decided id give upgrading to linux mint 8 codenamed “helena” another go, starting from a fresh install of linux mint 7 “gloria”. This time i ended up with a COMPLETELY different result. Now either my problem lies in this update or the one before. This time i ended up with linux mint 8, just as before, only now, there is no splash screen, and i can still customize my GDM. Now as most have come to realize with 8, is that due to the change in coding, etc, the GDM lost most of its customization abilities. I have all the new features that helena brought to the table. Yet, my linux installation is a mutt,part linux mint 7, part linux mint 8, and part ubuntu 9.10. Note, i added ubuntu 9.10 to the list of how my installation ended up a mutt, due to the fact that now, my rotating cube found in the compiz config settings manager now can have the top and bottom caps change to how ever i wanted, unlike how in 7, i was not able to do so.Iv got some debugging to do, but otherwise, linux mint 8, turned out great, thank mint team!!!
Hi you all,
Well I’ve just finished upgrading Gloria x64 to Helena x64 and just one word: SUPER!
I’ve followed the instructions of number 46 (Kaktuspalme) and it works just fine! Thanks for this!
But there was one problem. My laptop is an HP Pavilion dv7-1220ed and after the reboot my network didn’t connect anymore :-(.
But Broadcom has his new drivers: Broadcom’s hybrid Linux driver available for 32 and 64 bits. Just download these drivers and follow the instructions. And now I’m running Helena x64.
Thanks and soon my donation will come your way 🙂
Keep on the good work.
Greets
jimbo_tank.
I have just upgraded from Gloria to Helena x64 using the GUI option. Everything is working fine sound, graphics etc.
Thanks
Father’s computer was upgraded smoothly except that:
– I needed to give “apt install moonlight-plugin-mozilla && apt install mint-meta-main” command after the upgrade.
– I have made “apt autoremove” and russian localization for OpenOffice.org has gone. I needed to install it myself.
– Terminal has become uncolorful.
The next step is my laptop…
I was upgrading my linux-mint 7 to 8 by Terminal and all the things were fine .but when the downloading finished it started to install those staff on that time suddenly my laptop battery finished. 🙁
now when I turn my laptop on and when I open linux-mint the black screen comes and say:
“one or more of the mounts listed in /etc/fstd cannot yet be mounted
(ESC for recovery shell)
/:waiting for /dev/sda7
/tmp: waiting for (null)
swap: waiting for UUID=8fa81e3-1425-494c-9d4b-b7ce04c99327”
and after if I press “ENTER” i can access to a terminal on which is like : root@(none):~#
and there when I type “apt upgrade” or apt dist-upgrade”
this error occurs :
”
W: NOT using locking for read only lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock
E: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually
run ‘sudo dpkg –configure -a’ to correct the problem.
”
and then when i try with ‘sudo dpkg –configure -a’
this error occurs :
”
sudo: unable to resolve host (none)
dpkg: unable to access dpkg status area: Read-only file system
”
🙁
I’m confused :-s
please help me