Okay, I thought I could wait, but I couldn’t, so yesterday I decided to do an “in place” upgrade of my office desktop from Linux Mint 17.3 to Mint 18.

It didn’t go smoothly.

First, let me stress that the Linux Mint community strongly recommends a fresh install every time you upgrade from one release to another, and especially when it is from one major release, like Mint 17, to another, i.e. Mint 18. They ask you to backup your home directory and package lists, base the system and then restore. The problem is that I often make a lot of changes to my system which usually involves editing files in the system /etc directory, and this doesn’t capture that.

One thing I’ve always loved about Debian is the ability to upgrade in place (and often remotely) and this holds true for Debian-based distros like Ubuntu and Mint. So I was determined to try it out.

I found a couple of posts that suggested all you need to do is replace “rosa” with “sarah” in your repository file, and then do a “apt-get update” followed by an “apt-get dist-upgrade”. That doesn’t work, as I found out, because Mint 18 is based on Xenial (Ubuntu 16.04) and not Trusty (Ubuntu 14.04). Thus, you also need to replace every instance of “trusty” with “xenial” to get it to work.

Finally, once I got that working, I couldn’t get into the graphical desktop. Cinnamon wouldn’t load. It turns out Cinnamon is in a “backport” branch for some reason, so I had to add that to my repository file as well.

To save trouble for anyone else wanting to do this, here is my current /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list file:

deb http://packages.linuxmint.com sarah main upstream import backport #id:linuxmint_main
# deb http://extra.linuxmint.com sarah main #id:linuxmint_extra

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates main restricted universe multiverse

deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ xenial-security main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu/ xenial partner

Note that I commented out the “extra” repository since one doesn’t exist for sarah yet.

The upgrade took a long time. We have a decent connection to the Internet at the office and still it was over an hour to download the packages. There were a number of conflicts I had to deal with, but overall that part of the process was smooth.

Things seem to be working, and the system seems a little faster but that could just be me wanting it to be faster. Once again many thanks to the Mint team for making this possible.