Question about upgrading to 20.2
by mfoley from LinuxQuestions.org on (#5SXRS)
I am helping a friend upgrade his Mint Cinnamon. I'm quite familiar with Linux, but not the Mint distro.
When opening Firefox to the Mint home page there was a message that the Mint version (18.1) was too old to support Firefox. The page had a link to instructions on upgrading. We downloaded and burned the ISO image, booted it and clicked 'Install' on the desktop. I accepted all the default answers except I clicked on the option to install the CODECS. The original 18.1 partition was on /dev/sda2 with the swap on /dev/sda3.
When the installation was completed and rebooted, all the user's desktop settings were gone. Inspecting the drive I saw that a new partition /dev/sda4 was created and was the boot partition, and the 18.1 partition, with the user's desktop, setting and applications was out there on /dev/sda2, but not mounted. Re-booting and selecting the 18.1 option from the grub menu booted back to 18.1 and settings and apps were there.
Did I do something wrong? Other distros I've used upgrade in-place and preserve the user, and all existing apps.
If this is "normal" how does the user recover his desktop, apps, etc. other than copying files from the 18.1 partition to the new one, changing user/groups etc., and reinstalling (apt-get) apps. That seems like a LOT of manual work and fraught with potential peril.
Please advise. I can start over if necessary.
When opening Firefox to the Mint home page there was a message that the Mint version (18.1) was too old to support Firefox. The page had a link to instructions on upgrading. We downloaded and burned the ISO image, booted it and clicked 'Install' on the desktop. I accepted all the default answers except I clicked on the option to install the CODECS. The original 18.1 partition was on /dev/sda2 with the swap on /dev/sda3.
When the installation was completed and rebooted, all the user's desktop settings were gone. Inspecting the drive I saw that a new partition /dev/sda4 was created and was the boot partition, and the 18.1 partition, with the user's desktop, setting and applications was out there on /dev/sda2, but not mounted. Re-booting and selecting the 18.1 option from the grub menu booted back to 18.1 and settings and apps were there.
Did I do something wrong? Other distros I've used upgrade in-place and preserve the user, and all existing apps.
If this is "normal" how does the user recover his desktop, apps, etc. other than copying files from the 18.1 partition to the new one, changing user/groups etc., and reinstalling (apt-get) apps. That seems like a LOT of manual work and fraught with potential peril.
Please advise. I can start over if necessary.