How To Upgrade Linux Mint Debian Edition

Upgrade

I recently had to perform upgrades for multiple machines from Update Pack 4 to Update Pack 5. It was really rather easy to do as the following instructions show.

Thanks to this blog for correcting some of my mistakes.

Update the Update Manager

The update manager will indicate when updates are available. For a distribution upgrade like Update Pack 5, I revert to command line. Use CTL-ALT-F1 to switch to a native console session. Then update the update manager with the commands

sudo apt-get install mint-debian-mirrorssudo apt-get install mintupdate-debiansudo apt-get --fix-missing --list-cleanup updatesudo apt-get install mintupdate-debian

Run Distribution Upgrade

So, now we are ready to perform the upgrade with

sudo apt-get --fix-missing --list-cleanup updatesudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Questions Asked During Upgrade

Questions will be asked during the upgrade. If you have a default installation you can normally use the package maintainers version. If unsure check the differences.

With kernel updates you will be asked where to install Grub.
Answer with the location of your current Grub menu, which on most systems is /dev/sda.

Post Upgrade Tasks

Get Best mint-debian Mirror

After installation refresh mirrors with

sudo dpkg-reconfigure mint-debian-mirrors

When I did this I got the following error.

How to Solve NO_PUBKEY 07DC563D1F41B907

Thanks to this blog for this solution.

If we add the repository http://www.debian-multimedia.org  on Debian testing
it can happen that when we try to execute the comand apt-get update, we see a GPG error:

W: GPG error: http://www.debian-multimedia.org squeeze Release:The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not availableNO_PUBKEY 07DC563D1F41B907

To solve this problem we need to install the debian-keyring package

apt-get install debian-keyring

And then execute this command:

gpg --keyring /usr/share/keyrings/debian-keyring.gpg -a --export 07DC563D1F41B907 | apt-key add -

After that, when we try to execute apt-get update, there will be no the GPG error anymore.

Google Chrome

The repositories for Google Chrome (I use the beta releases) are no longer valid. Google recommends downloading the Debian package and re-installing. This updates the Debian repositories.

Thunar Slow to Start

This is due to Thunar trying to auto-mount network drives. It is easy to fix with,

vi /usr/shares/gvfs/mounts/network.mount

And set 

AutoMount=false