HOWTO Upgrade or Install Linux Mint by Keepi...

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Written by:
MagicMint

Score: 4
votes: 11
Format: Article

HOWTO Upgrade or Install Linux Mint by

Keeping Your Data and Settings

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Scope
The 17.x releases of Linux Mint which began with Qiana (will) share with each
other not only the long term support until 2019, but also the easy upgradability
from such a point release to another: as the software base remains the same
(namely Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr), so do your user environment, and therefore all
of your data will remain in place. In other words, youll have to adapt to the new
features in Cinnamon or MATE only.
But next year at the latest, there will be an updated software base for Linux Mint,
so well have to face again that nasty problem of how to avoid copying (maybe)
gigabytes of data from users and losing their beloved settings a problem that
everyone switching from another (working) distro or from an older, major release of
Linux Mint is still confronted with.
That is, we want to save us from as much work as possible, as opposed to try to
save and then to restore lots of data and personal settings which might be very
time consuming and might also cause permission issues within the new system
This tutorial simply presumes that you made conscientiously your backups any time
in the past
, just in case something would go wrong, but we dont want to bother
ourselves with that while were installing an exciting new version of Linux Mint

Step 1
As youd probably guess, you must have an external boot medium in order to install
a new Linux system. This is the easiest thing in the world:
a. First of all, download the latest release of Linux Mint to a folder named iso in
your home folder. This way, we can use ~/iso (i.e. /home/your_user_name
/iso) as a reference location for the transfer of knowledge from the old
system to the new one.
b. Check if the download has gone smoothly by right clicking on the ISO le (in
Linux Mint) and then selecting Check MD5. You can do this from the
command line (in a terminal) too:
$ md5sum ~/iso/*.iso

c. The result must match the checksum displayed on the website of course,
otherwise you have to download the ISO image again
! Its also a good idea
to save that checksum by pasting it into the following le:
$ gedit ~/iso/checksum.md5

d. Now, its time to burn the ISO to a medium, i.e. to a USB stick or a blank
DVD. The rst kind of medium is faster and better integrated into the le
manager of Linux Mint: a right click on the ISO le or a left click in nemos
menu on File Make bootable USB stick thats it. If your distro doesnt allow
for that, you can still abide by Clems tutorial.

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As far as the live DVD is concerned, you have to ensure that the ISO image is
transferred to the disk by your preferred burner application, e.g. brasero,
xfburn, etc.
e. Once nished, eject the live medium, and then re-insert it again. In the folder
it opens up or which appears when you click on the symbol of the medium,
start a terminal. Therein, you should verify the checksum of your live USB or
DVD by typing:
$ md5sum -c MD5SUMS

Step 2
We must now collect some bits of information that we will need in order to conserve
the current state of our data before we can denitely freeze the old system for the
installation process.
a. First, you must save your software selection with Mints Backup Tool (under
Administration in the menu) to the ~/iso folder, albeit older versions of
mintBackup might store it in another folder, e.g. / or /home. Anyway, open
the destination folder as Root, and make the backup over to yourself by
changing software_selection__package.list Properties Permissions. Then,
you can easily drag it to ~/iso.
b. On top of that, you must also backup the sources of your additional packages
(if any). This is much easier in the terminal:
$ mkdir ~/iso/apt
$ cp -R /etc/apt/sources* ~/iso/apt

c. As we want to preserve the users data, we must know about their

whereabouts after installation
. Thats why we need some more
command-line magic (assuming youve got less than 10 users on your
machine):
$ cat /etc/passwd | grep 100.: > ~/iso/users.list

Each line of of the resulting ~/iso/users.list will contain one line for each real
user account on the system, with seven elds delimited by colons (:) which
store the users login name, an x, his numerical user ID, his numerical group
ID, his full name, the path to his home folder and his command interpreter.
Please write down these data for the very rst user, as you will need them
during the installation, just in a moment when you wont be able to access that
le.
d. Its equally important to remember the grouping of the users too. So create a
new le with:

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$ gedit ~/iso/old_groups.sh

Fill this command le with the following contents:

#!/bin/bash
# iso/old_groups.sh (MagicMint) O0202
# Writing out old users groups
USERS=~/iso/users.list
echo -n > ~/iso/groups.list
for user in `cat "$USERS" | cut -d':' -f1`; do
echo -n "$user": >> ~/iso/groups.list
sudo -u "$user" groups | tee -a ~/iso/groups.list
done
#End of script

Save the script and run it by typing:

$ source ~/iso/old_groups.sh

e. At this stage, you should have the following items in your ~/iso folder:
a folder named apt;
the ISO image ending in .iso;
its checksum.md5;
a list of your selected packages;
the script old_groups.sh;
a list of the users on your machine and
a list of the groups they belong to.

Tip
There are certainly some corrections or improvements you made to your old
system. If you had respected some rules, you could re-apply your changes to the
new system without hassle (if not, keep those rules in mind until the next upgrade
):
Conguration changes aecting the whole system (as opposed to those of a
single user) belong into the folder /etc;
Non-standard but shared applications (like additional commands, scripts, etc.)
and their resources belong into the folder /usr/local (wine applications and
virtual machines are not shared by default, hence theyre always installed in a
users home folder);
Everything else is the domain of package managers and the running system,
so dont touch any other folder, unless in case of inevitable necessity, e.g.
when changing the boot background;
Document any change of yours, for instance by copying the modied les
somewhere in your home directory, i.e. by mirroring the directory structure
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for those copies under ~/sys/etc and ~/sys/usr/local.

Step 3
Now, reboot into a live session with the medium prepared in Step1. This is the
stage where you should thoroughly test whether the new release of Linux Mint
works out for you and your hardware, even in the case you had a well working
system, since there could be regressions in a new release. Anyway, you should
focus on the following points, because in general the newer the hardware, the likely
it is to come across something that declines service yet
are that old annoyances are gone
):

(but conversely, chances

a. You can use your monitor in its maximal resolution and make use of the
extended capacities of your graphics card as far as practicable;
b. The [Fn] keys, the built-in touchpad (in notebooks) and the touchscreen (if
available) work acceptably an external mouse shouldnt pose any problem
most of the time;
c. All the network interfaces (Bluetooth, WiFi, LAN) still work;
d. You can avail yourself as usual of your storage and other external devices that
you care of (they connect, and they are readable and writable);
e. If you encounter any problems here, please google around to nd out if there
is any chance of a remedy otherwise you should consider to skip the release
and wait for a while, even if the support for your old release had expired
already

Step 4
Once youve made your decision, you should freeze the system. Thereafter, you
ought not reboot into that old Linux on the hard disk, because there will be be no
place where to login to
:
a. Still in the live session, (double) click in the Computer folder on the disk that
contains the old system, or more exactly the /home directory, where all of
your users reside in user_folders named after them;
b. Therein, right click on one of the user_folders and Open it as Root;
c. Go back in the new window with Elevated privileges to the /home folder;

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d. Rename each user_folder to user_folder.old;

e. Close the disk in the le managers side panel.

Intermediary Step
This step is totally unnecessary
, but only if the /home directory aforesaid has its
own partition. Although this sounds logical, because you wish to keep all your data
and settings apart while at the same time youre craving for a newer system which
would be more state-of-the-art, the tradition of Windows and other poorly bred
distros often misleads people to store anything in the same partition on the disk.
However, if you want to separate the data from the rest, the best is to put /home on
a partition of its own.
a. Within the live session, start Menu Administration GParted;
b. Once the application nished scanning your disks, nd the root partition of
your old system, i.e. the one in which /home is hidden. If youre lucky, then its
called ROOT (however, for such human-readable names to work, you must
not forget
to label the partitions when formatting them or afterwards).
Make that partition ca. 2432 GiB smaller with (Partition) Resize/Move and
rename it to HOME;
c. In that newly freed space, create by clicking (Partition) New a partition
named ROOT of the suggested type and with the proposed parameters.
Then, press (Edit) Apply All Operations and quit the application;
d. Now, open in the Computer folder the disk called HOME, and therein, as
root, the folder named home. Once the root window (the one with Elevated
privileges) opened, go back in it to the disks folder, where you should delete
everything except the home folder;
e. Open the home folder, and select the *.old pattern with [Ctrl+S]. The items
selected should be the user_folder.old from Step4, so move (i.e. drag) them all
to the disk. Go back to the latter once again, and delete the sole home folder.
Close that disk, and your computer should be now in a similar state with
regard to the data as in the step before, with the essential dierence that you
had to delete the old Linux system.

Caution
Actually, the whole step above is the only one where things can really go wrong
,
if you dont pay attention, so only do it once for good to never have to re-do it
again: in the only case you had made the mistake of installing on a single partition.

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Its always better to avoid it altogether by making up the following partitioning

scheme (beside the partitions possibly reclaimed by other operating systems):
a ROOT partition of the size given above (which is more than generous, by the
way: Im using about 9GiB on that partition right now);
a SWAP partition of about 150% the size of your RAM. If the latter is suicient
for your everyday work, you wont (and ought to) use the this partition for
anything else but hibernation (the powerless sleep mode of your computer);
a HOME partition which takes up the rest of the free space on your disk.

Step 5
Now comes the moment that you had so much longed for: the installation of your
new Linux Mint but you should do it by trying not to erase
your old data. If
you proceed like the following, the tenet of a fresh upgrade wont be violated,
although youll preserve your personal data while getting it done way much faster:
a. On the desktop of the live session, (double) click on Install Linux Mint. When
asked for the Installation type, you must choose the one which lets you freely
tune the partitions. In Rebeccas installer, the proper option is called:
Something else
You can create or resize partitions yourself, or choose multiple partitions for Linux Mint

b. Provided that you dont need to resize the partitions were talking about
installing a new system in place of a working old one, therefore you only have
to Change their Mount points, the only thing you have to keep in mind is
that the ROOT and SWAP partitions must be re-formatted, whereas HOME
must not. Under no circumstances!
c. The name elds in the dialog Who are you? must be lled with the full and
user (i.e. login) names of that very rst user from Step2. This is mandatory,
but the other elds can be chosen freely.
d. Finish the installation, but do not restart the computer!
e. From within the live session, you could reinstate those of your previous
customizations which you estimate still necessary for the new release, e.g.
changes made in /etc/fstab owing to SSD optimization or concerning a
Windows drive to be mounted at boot time always provided that you still can
access these customizations, for example by having heeded the advice in
Step2

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Step 6
Before rebooting, you must implicitly restore the rst users data yet:
a. Open the Computer folder again, and therein the (new) HOME disk;
b. Right click on the only user_folder which has no .old suix in its name, and
Open it as Root;
c. In the root window that pops up, the menu option View Show Hidden Files
must be ticked, in as much as you ought to Edit Select All or to press
[Ctrl+A] in order to delete everything in that folder;
d. Open up a new tab for the HOME disk, e.g. by right-clicking in the location bar
on the disk button Open in New Tab. Therein, go to the corresponding
user_folder.old, select all of its contents, and move (i.e. drag) it to the other
folder, the new and now empty user_folder with the same name;
e. As soon as this (almost instantaneous) operation is completed, i.e. the old
folder is emptied, you can safely delete it. After closing the disk, youre done
with the live session.

Step 7
After having rebooted into your brand new release of Linux Mint, you can proceed
with restoring the old state of your user environment. Again, there is a determinate
sequence of moves to follow:
a. Re-create all the users from ~/iso/users.list if the iso folder belongs to the
rst user, otherwise from the right /home/user_folder.old/iso/users.list as
you can see, its the order of creation of the users which is reected by their
user ID number (beginning with 1000) that matters. This order must be
respected in order to avoid any permission issues with data or commands
(this also holds for backups made on Linux partitions!).
First, Add the users one by one in Menu Administration Users and Groups
Users. Then, click on each user in turn to verify that their Groups match those
in groups.list (from the same backup folder as above). If not, click on the
users groups list and rectify it the correct user groups have a meaning
inasmuch as certain features like folder sharing or printer administration
wont work without them. After that, you can quit the Users & Groups
application, and open My Computer File System in the le manager.
Here, Open As Root the /home folder, and as such, make sure that View Show
Hidden Files is still ticked, and click View Extra Pane or press [F3]. For each
user youve just created, you must select all the contents in its user_folder,
delete it, and replace it with the contents of the corresponding
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user_folder.old. After which you can delete all the *.old folders in /home (all
this is essentially the same procedure as in Step6 for the rst user);
b. Now, you should turn to Menu Administration Software Sources. For your
Oicial repositories, you should select the fastest Mirrors available to you. If
you dont need Source code, dont enable it, and keep the hands o the
backport and romeo packages;
c. As far as PPAs and Additional repositories are concerned, the best way to
restore them is to google the contents of the les in the apt subfolder of your
iso folder, and to add them manually to the software sources, since the
structure of the /etc/apt system folder and the single repositories on the
internet could have been changed from the old software base to the new one.
The PPAs (Personal Package Archives) are specic to Ubuntu as they depend
on its particular releases most of the time, and they need Authentication keys
from the Ubuntu key servers;
d. You should check now if you had really
brought your software sources up to
date. This is the case only when the following command runs through with no
error messages:
$ sudo apt-get update

If any of the repositories generates a Packages 404 Not Found message,

then you ought to correct its address, if you can. If not, then you should
deactivate that repository altogether for now.
Now, click on the Update Manager in the panel, Edit [its] Preferences, most
notably the Auto-Refresh period which is unnecessarily short in general, and
Install [the] Updates.
e. Before getting down to the last thing left to do, the restoration of your old
software packages, you should install a small but useful package called
localepurge in order to save some space on your ROOT partition by keeping
unnecessary language packs from installing (if you dont know about locales,
just skip this):
$ sudo apt-get install localepurge

At the very last, start Menu Administration Backup Tool, click on Restore
software selection, and choose the software_selection__package.list from
the iso folder. This operation will re-install all of your previously used packages
as a whole and thats it

Notice
Be aware that depending on your formerly installed applications, the very last step
above can take a very long time to complete: while the installation from the USB

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stick has more of a coee break, the software restoration feels more like installing
Windows (without repeated restarts, however
), i.e. in my case a of an hour vs.
1 hours. But you should realize (what software reviews usually dont) that all
things considered, twice (or more times) the contents of the live DVD worth in
packages must be downloaded and installed at once, whereas this process was
evenly stretched over the whole lifetime of your previous system.

Step 8
As a nal touch, you could re-work your customizations from the old system, insofar
as you had saved them after Step2. Remember, however, that we didnt saved
anything from the old /root folder which is the place for custom settings for any
administrative task performed as a super user, like system proles of luckyBackup,
e.g. Such settings can only be restored from external backups with the right
permissions.
Before you can fully enjoy your shiny new Linux Mint, you should x as yet the
problems you ran into in Step3. But thats what the Community is for

External sources
This tutorial is just a detailed synthesis from my own experiences, a lengthy
discussion on the forums and another resource that didnt work satisfactorily for
me

Tags: upgrade, install, point release, major release, data, settings

Created: 1 year ago.
Last edited: 1 year ago.
Reviewed: 1 year ago.
Read 0 times.
Comments
Great article, thanks for your hard work in compiling it.

6 months ago

DarrenG

I also agree with http://community.linuxmint.com

/idea/view/4728 that mounting /home on dierent
partition during installation of Linux Mint should be the
default option. I think it would save people a lot of grief.
its a great howto.

(in my personal opinion, which does not matter at all,

I nd it a bit old school - No, dont shoot at me, please.
I imagine, how long it will take by your description
9 months ago
Rebel450 given and if it is really worth all that time spending.
I love solutions with a (modern) graphical interface
doing the job;

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I worked with aptik and mint backup - for me it was ne

that way.
Of course, on your way as per your description, you
have much more control
all over - but you need also a deeper knowledge, which
most people does not have ... as said before - just my
personal opinion)
In any case: This is a super how2 with deep
background: +
.
@zman58: Thats exactly whats youre supposed _not_
to do. Here is why:

1 year ago

1 year ago

1 year ago

1 year ago

11 of 12

1. In case of multiple users, youre more than likely to

run into permission issues, as external media are of type
FAT32 or NTFS most of the time;
2. Even Clem recommends a separate home (data)
partition in his MacBook installation guide
(http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/1643);
MagicMint 3. You must still know the _order_ of creation of your
users;
4. This operation might be lengthy if you have lots of
data (think of pictures, music, videos, etc.), and awful if
you have multiple users. The aim of this tutorial is just
to _avoid_ this really unnecessary (and repeated) step,
all the more as its unwise to mix old and new settings;
5. How do you know the permissions of _each_ le
youve swapped out and back?
I personally would just:

zman58

jrwilson

1. Move my, and other users, personal data to external

storage media.
2. Install Linux Mint 17.1 from scratch. Reclaim all hard
drive space.
3. Create users as before.
4. Restore users data from external storage media.
5. Restore proper permissions on imported user data.
Bookmarks and email are easy to move this way.
I'm not skilled with using the terminal. So I will save all
I want to keep, on another medium. Flash drive of some
type.
I was hoping I could x my freezing up problem,by
using my 17 Qiana DVD.
Guess it don't work that way. Thanks

+1. A lot of work went into presenting this detailed step

ConorCork by step Guide. Thanks.

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1 year ago

1 year ago

1 year ago

https://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/1946

@Hammer459: Thats why I mourn my past Gentoo days

sometimes, although its rst and only install wiped out
MagicMint my RH 6 and Windows partitions ;-)
@MagicMintI agree mostly with what you say. I am a
strong proponent of incremental install upgrades.
Redhat has used that since RH 5. Never had problems.
HPUX had that with no problems since before 94. and
so on....
Hammer459 But Ubuntu and Mint claims it is too much risk and that
the destructive reinstall is a safer method. I have not
have any problems with upgrades of Unix/linux between
1985 and 2010. I have not upgraded Mint easily and
safely, not even once with Mint.
@Hammer: You should read more carefully. This tutorial
is linked in above. The problem with those tutorials
from the beginnings of Linux Mint is that they do _not_
treat the problem xed here: retaining both settings
_and_ data. The question of the permissions in case of
external backups is an important one, and the restoring
of gigabytes of data is _never_ trivial nor fast as
MagicMint lightning. If it was, mintBackup would receive more
positive reviews, I think ;-)
By the way, I hate loosing years of work, just because
nobody cares about updating data Its always a risky
job to upgrade, and as far as I saw it, even the installer
of LM 17.1 cannot be trusted truly :-(

1 year ago

Or you could use this _Oicial_ tutorial on the subject...

Hammer459 http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2

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