Finally, after almost four years i decided to upgrade my old Ubuntu 9.04 to something newer. I wanted to avoid installing "short lived" distributions in terms of repositories support and the same time avoid experiments with distributions that require compiling everything. I even thought to put FreeBSD. Nice operating system, you have both options to compile the packages or download the binaries. But, most of all i liked the gnome2 they are using. Unfortunately, i test on the VM showed me that not everything is working ok with the source packages (ports was not working well for gnome2 - clean install..), but it was extremely fast!
So, i have either to go for Fedora (too unstable for my taste), Ubuntu (where is gnome???), or something else. So i selected to go with Mint 12 64bit. It has long term support, includes gnome 2/3, has the same repositories with Ubuntu and includes some nice meta-packages for automatic installation of video/audio codecs. The installer recognized my old Ubuntu installation and moved my home directory without problems.
Then, in started installing the 32bit libraries. A mess, after installing manually some debian packages the whole packaging system broken and i had to remove critical parts of the system. So, i had to install it again and with more caution. This time i had to edit the deb packages to remove manually the dependencies with other packages. And it worked well. What were the packages that i had problem: Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime (you need them if you want to read mail from IBM). I had to follow a set of instructions for installing them: i had even to download and compile a file to make it work properly. Installation was much easier in 10.04 LTS versions of Ubuntu. I can't imagine how the installation will be with Ubuntu 14.04!
After spending a Sunday evening, everything works fine now. I still had to use some old tricks for making skype to work with video (use with LD_PRELOAD to 32bit version of v4l1compat.so), but everything works fine now. Well, i still missing the old gnome setting and support.. but i guess i just have to move on.
So, i have either to go for Fedora (too unstable for my taste), Ubuntu (where is gnome???), or something else. So i selected to go with Mint 12 64bit. It has long term support, includes gnome 2/3, has the same repositories with Ubuntu and includes some nice meta-packages for automatic installation of video/audio codecs. The installer recognized my old Ubuntu installation and moved my home directory without problems.
Then, in started installing the 32bit libraries. A mess, after installing manually some debian packages the whole packaging system broken and i had to remove critical parts of the system. So, i had to install it again and with more caution. This time i had to edit the deb packages to remove manually the dependencies with other packages. And it worked well. What were the packages that i had problem: Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime (you need them if you want to read mail from IBM). I had to follow a set of instructions for installing them: i had even to download and compile a file to make it work properly. Installation was much easier in 10.04 LTS versions of Ubuntu. I can't imagine how the installation will be with Ubuntu 14.04!
After spending a Sunday evening, everything works fine now. I still had to use some old tricks for making skype to work with video (use with LD_PRELOAD to 32bit version of v4l1compat.so), but everything works fine now. Well, i still missing the old gnome setting and support.. but i guess i just have to move on.
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ReplyDeleteI think you should have waited some more, as Linux Mint 13 “Maya” RC was just released. Maya is going to be supported until April 2017, while Lisa's support ends in April 2013.
ReplyDeleteTrue, however Ubuntu repositories will be online when the the support of Mint ends, and then i will just update. Upgrading the distribution is really a pain. I just hope that the transition will have less pain...
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