Mint upgrade HOWTO

[Dave Dartnall]

Is it possible to upgrade from helena to julia and if so how please?

[elija]

You can do an in place upgrade but, it is risky. The lead developer of Mint recommends a clean install.

Of course you could go for one of the LMDE versions (Gnome or XFCE) which at the price of the occasional breakage due to the testing nature of the Debian repositories gives you a very snappy rolling release. That would definitely have to be a clean install though.

[Dave Dartnall]

Thank you elija, but is it right that a clean installation over the existing helena will lose all my existing settings.., lots of photographs, email addresses, scripts and data etc etc... A real job to start again - and the risky option doesn't sound too attractive either.
Maybe create another partition on the drive for a new clean installation and access helena data from there would be one way to go but still not at all perfect eh?
Regards
DD

[Dave Dartnall]

Sorry Elija, your link provides a full explanation which I'd missed on the cursory look I made before the last post. Thank you, that answers all the questions that I'd been googling for.
Good luck
DD

[elija]

Simply put; yes it will lose everything unless you have a separate /home partition. However you should always take a backup of data and settings before you do anything like this even if you have a separate /home partition.

It may be worth getting a low cost external drive and copying your data to it and then unplugging it before you install / upgrade; that way your data should be a lot safer.