Workstation OS Upgrades

From Maya To Olivia

Recently we upgraded our workstation operating systems from Mint 13 (Maya) to Mint 15 (Olivia) and the initial impression is positive and there are noticeable improvements.

We switched to Cinnamon from Unity which was one of the reasons for our initial switch from Ubuntu and I tend to find that I can just get on with work when using Cinnamon over Unity.

Linux Mint

Upgrade Method

For our upgrade we used the apt method of editing our /etc/apt/sources.list file and replacing the correct release names and although this is not the recommended method I have always upgrade like this and its worked.

We also use rsync to backup any files needed on the workstation so if something goes wrong we can restore the system from that source.

You can also use dpkg to dump a list of programs installed on the system so you can restore them if you need to the command to get the package listing is,

root@chic:~# dpkg --get-selections > workstation_package_list.txt

The upgrade for our workstation went through like a breeze we went from 13 to 14 without a hitch then from 14 to 15 after a few hours we had our fully upgraded system.

Impressions

Everything looked similar to the previous version although fonts and theme do look slightly different  from the previous version, I am not so keen on the font.

Hot corners got enabled again for some reason unknown so I had to disable them as I cannot stand them my mouse tends to move here and there and when I select the menu I sometimes just go to the top left corner.

I have also got double entries inside my preferences in the menu for some reason although I am very rarely in there so this is not a problem for me just a niggle. I used to tweak my systems and compile my own kernels but now I just want my system to work and Mint does that for me which in turn allows me to get on with my work.

One thing that did stop working was our eclipse ADT (Android Development Tools) install which we use for our Android development but reinstalling was simple and it is all working now I am also not sure what went wrong there.

Virtual box works fine although VMWare player will not work due to kernel module problems but I do not use this for work so again its not a problem.

Conclusion

We like Linux Mint and will continue to use it for our main workstations for the foreseeable future and hope to see it flourish.