How to Upgrade or Reload Linux while Keeping Your Data.

greetings and salutations and thank you for clicking on the video today I'm going to show you how you can upgrade your Linux distribution or change distributions while still keeping all of your data on the computer and this is really great to know how to do if you want to just like move from a boon to 1404 to 1604 or in the case of Linux Mint you might want to move from seventeen point three to eighteen when it comes along there's talk about that they're going to might be able to come up with an in-place upgrade for that major change from the seventeen Series to the eighteen series but if they don't and you want to upgrade you're going to have to actually reinstall the operating system to get to the latest one and this is also good if you want to switch distributions so let's say for instance that you're running a boon to with the gnome desktop so you're running a boon to gnome and you decide that you want to run Fedora with the gnome desktop well you can do this and you can keep all of your settings and when you reinstall the system it will all just show up this does not replace a backup gang this is not I would not recommend endeavouring to do this and not taking the step to back up all of your data before you do this because if you make a mistake or it doesn't go right you could lose everything on the system so this will save you some time because you won't have to copy all of the data back into the computer once you reinstall and reset everything up and all of your settings and bookmarks and your browsers and all that stuff you won't have to do it but you do want to back all that stuff up so look at my videos on backups today we're gonna focus on Linux Mint and I'm actually going to install in a virtual machine Linux Mint 13 which is act actually still being supported since that was a long term support released based on a boon to 1204 it's good until April 2017 so in today's example we're going to upgrade Linux Mint 13 to Linux Mint 17 points but all of the principles apply no matter how you're gonna do this and we'll talk more about it as we roll along the first thing that you need to do to be able to do this is set up your system so that you can if you install Linux on your machine and then you just choose the option where it tells you that it will partition the drive for you automatically it'll create one big partition for the entire system to live in okay and that partition will contain your home folder your boot folder everything will all go in one space which is fine the system will run just fine that way but when you want to do an upgrade the only thing that you will be able to do is to just wipe the drive and reinstall the system so you'll have to restore all of your data and put all your settings back and all that stuff manually so when you install Linux for the first time we're going to use a partition scheme that will facilitate the ability to upgrade or replace the distribution and keep all of the user data data so this is Linux Mint 13 s installer here but they all kind of asked the same question especially in the aboon 2 family whether you want to have the system install alongside of what's already there you want to erase the disk or if you want to do something else or partition manually so we're going to partition manually today and I'm gonna show you how to set up these partitions so here we go and I cannot resize this screen this little window it's kind of is what it is I guess that's because I'm running in a virtual machine or it's turned off in the Installer I'm not really sure what the deal is so push your chair up a little closer and get a little closer to the screen in this case this virtual machine already has Linux Mint installed on it and when I installed it originally I chose the option to allow the system to automatically partition the drive and what it did was it created one big happy partition through all of the files in there all of the folders for the entire system and then it created a swap partition at the end of the drive and so we're going to do this in such a way that we can actually have access to parts of the system and separate partitions which will make it a lot easier so let's create a new partition table this will start from scratch and we just click on the free space here click again and now we can create partitions so the first partition that we are going to create is going to be very small it is a primary partition it has to be and it is 512 megabytes I have to clear that out first hold on here we go 512 megabytes which is really more than you need it's like double what you need but just in case we don't want to ever have our little boot partition running out of space that might cause us some major heart burden down the road we want this to be a primary partition and we are going to make it ext to the ext2 file system is an older file system for linux and it's very good for very small drives it does not have journaling so therefore it has very little overhead and it has very fast reads and writes and it's extremely reliable so that's why I'm choosing that and then for the mount point we're going to choose boot and we're going to create that first partition next we're going to click on the free space again and now we're going to make this a primary partition I don't usually ever create logical partitions except for maybe the last partition on the disk and that's if it's a very large disk and I might want to add a partition later so for this partition which is going to be where the system lives if this was a real big drive then I would go ahead and give this about 25 gigabytes of space but since this is just a little virtual machine drive I will give it 15 gigabytes which will be more than enough to run the system if you didn't add a lot of stuff to it this will be ext4 which is chosen by default and then we are going to make that the / or root partition so we'll go ahead and create that click on the free space now it's time to make a swap partition and the swap partition is a little bit more than the memory that you already have installed in the computer if you have a great deal of memory in the computer like 8 gigabytes or more you could make this just a little 2 gigabyte partition the system would probably run fine but if you have 8 gigabytes or under then I suggest go ahead and allocate the memory size plus a little bit more and I know some people say don't use a swap partition you don't need it that's not true some programs do need it and the system needs a swap partition to be able to go to sleep and hibernate properly so we're gonna make that 2000 we're gonna make it primary choose swap area from the list there's no mount point for a swap area so there you go there's the swap partition and then the rest of the disk we're going to go ahead and allocate everything that's on the disk and this is your home partition and it's very important that this is the last partition on the disk ok because there are a couple of reasons for that first of all if you ever want to clone this hard drive and then put a bigger hard drive in the computer then what you'll be able to do is clone it and then you can just increase the size of the home partition if you have a swap partition at the end of your disk you can't really and you can't really increase the size of the home partition which is what what you're worried about that's where your personal data lives so you want to make sure that your home partition is the last on the disk I'm going to make it primary and yes this means that we have four primary partitions on this disk and that means that we cannot go back and add any partitions later because the Master Boot Record is basically full if I would choose to create a logical partition it would actually create a fourth partition which is a logical partition with more partitions in it and then I could go back and re partition that disk later but in my case I know for sure that I'm never going to want to add another partition to this disk so we're gonna choose all of the remaining space which because this is a very small drive isn't much and we're gonna mount that to home now if you are actually installing Linux on a computer that has like an old 40 gigabyte hard drive in it and that's it I don't recommend doing this because number one it's it's inefficient it's a waste of space because now we have like space in the boot partition and the the root partition where it's not going to be able to write files to if it's in the home partition so if it's a very small drive just throw everything in one big heart one big partition it's more efficient that way but any drive that's over like 160 gigabytes or something like that should be partitioned this way and we are talking about drives computers that do not have ufi or secure boot enabled because that requires special partitioning and I usually just turn that off anyway I never use it so if you're dealing with a computer that does have that on and for some reason you want to have that on you can't disable it then I'm not sure exactly how you would do what I'm doing in this video today it's not impossible and it can be done I just don't know how to do it because the first thing I do with a computer if I'm going to load Linux on it is turn all that crap off because I really don't see any benefit in it at all so we have our partitions laid out and as you can see all of the partitions that will contain data are going to be formatted that's important make note of that and the bootloader is going to go on the one hard drive that's in the machine so this is ready to install so I'm gonna go ahead and turn this loose and it's going to go ahead and start installing the system so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and install this system and while it's getting itself set up I'm gonna pause the video here in a minute or two then once we get it set up we're gonna back up the programs we installed I'm going to show you the tool that you would use to back up your data in Linux Mint this is Linux Mint specific okay and then we will attempt to upgrade so let me go ahead and get my information in here and it doesn't matter what I call it and I'll give it a super safe and easy password and now I'm just going to go ahead and let the system roll on before we do there is a note that I need to make if you choose this option to encrypt your home folder we will not be able to do what we're going to do in the next part of this video and the reason why is because this encryption links the home folder to the operating system that's running the system this is a good idea if you're really worried about somebody coming in with a USB stick that has some sort of operating system on it booting up your computer and trying to steal your data they won't be able to do it because unless the native operating system is running then the home folder is encrypted they will not be able to read it because the keys are associated with the native operating system nice feature here but it doesn't allow you to later on actually replace the operating system without having to reload the entire home folder and it does give you a hit on performance as far as that's concerned because everything is encrypted and everything has to be checked with a key before it can be read or written so that's something to keep in mind so I'm gonna go ahead and continue here we're gonna let lennick Linux Mint 13 continue to install on this system and then once it gets installed I will reboot it to the desktop will make some changes will backup some files and then we will upgrade the system so hang around okay Linux Mint 13 is installed and up and running happily in the virtual machine and this is what the desktop looks like so what I want to do is make a couple of changes to this desktop and then we can add a couple of pieces of software as well and I'll show you how to use the special Linux Mint backup tool to move from one version to the next or be able to reload your machine so let's see the first thing that I want to do is it's not here this is the older version so I've got to go find the other settings program okay let's just go to brightness and lock and then I can go to all settings and then I will be able to change the appearance let's just choose another background I'm just trying to make the desktop a little bit different here that's all I'm doing so we've got a nice new background there and that way when we reinstall we'll be able to see that our settings stuck and let's see if we go to desktop here then I can go ahead and take this computer icon off the desktop because I don't need that and we've put the network on there okay so that's fine so there's our settings and let's go ahead and open up the software center we'll add a couple of programs just so we can use the backup tool to save our program list so we'll open up the software manager and let's see what should we install I mean we can install most anything let's see if bleach bit is in here that's a good one this is the older version though yes there is a version of bleach bit so let's go ahead and install that OOP that's not gonna work because I typed in the wrong password okay so we'll install bleach bit that's installing it should let me search for something else so we'll put in no no let's see if let's put the chromium browser in here throw me umm there's the chromium browser so let me go ahead and get that a couple of things in here because you don't usually use the system exactly as it is it comes to you so you're all gonna be adding software yes so that is installing and once that gets installed I will show you the tool that you use to create a backup of all of the software that is on your Linux Mint system so if you're gonna move from linux mint 17.3 to 18 when it comes along you can do this exact same procedure it's not thirteen to seventeen point three they are talking about creating a utility that will allow you to do an in-place upgrade from seventeen point three to eighteen but in case they don't this is how you're gonna have to do it okay so we're all good and installed there so let's go and find the backup tool what happened to my there it is my desktop went a little wonky no make it go away I don't need that Thank You G all right use the backup tool it's gonna ask for my password and this backup tool gives us a couple of options here so we will be able to backup files if you had an external hard drive then you could click on this and then you could select your external hard drive and this will create a backup of all of your data files and that way you can move it from installation to installation this is a Linux Mint specific tool gang but if you're not using Linux Mint you could use the backup software that comes with your distribution or you could use gr sync to create your own backups like I do I posted a video about that but this is really cool we can backup the software selection so that's what we're going to do today and this is a Linux Mint specific thing and the destination let's we'll put it on the desktop that's a good place for it and we will go forward and now it's going to create a list of all the software that we installed in the system that wasn't necessarily in the distribution so this is the list and we'll go ahead and apply you can go through and make exceptions there but if you're just in a hurry and you just want to do your upgrade then this is all you got to do okay it says it was backed up successfully let's go look for the file where'd it put the file let's do that again some wind goofy there do it one more time here backup tool alright we want to backup our software we're gonna put it where destination put it on the desktop oh it put it in the root folders where I put it just take the long way around to do it okay that's fine now it took it okay that's what happened before so it actually did create it it just stuck it in the root folder unfortunately that will not do us any good if we should back up the system because we're going to replace everything in the root folder so we definitely want it to be in our home folder and we want it to be where we can access it on a different drive would even be better let's go ahead and apply now we've created the file where we can use it see this is the kind of mistake that you guys might make so I don't really get upset if they come up when we're doing videos so what we're gonna do now is we're gonna go ahead and close shut down this machine we're gonna pretend that we have all of our files and everything backed up you would want to create that file before you backed up all your files by the way so that the backup would be on the you know the the list of the stuff that you need to reinstall would be back on the computer if you should have to restore all of your backup files okay so here we are so now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and save you the agony of having to watch me boot up the virtual machine and we're gonna start the video again right when we get to where we are going to partition to install Linux Mint overtop of our Linux Mint 13 so we're going to install 17.3 over Linux Mint 13 the machine is all booted up and we are at the installation screen for linux mint 17.3 and here is where we need to make some very careful careful adjustments to make sure that we do not undo all the work we just did we want to reinstall Linux Mint and move from Linux Mint 13 to 17.3 without losing all of our data so you're going to choose something else here on this screen okay so we will continue wait for it to get itself together now you see here are the partitions and it's kind enough to tell us that Linux Mint 13 Maya is loaded on the system so to do our upgrade first we will choose the boot partition and it comes up and it says do not use this partition well we want to use it so we're going to make it the ext2 file system remember that's what we used before we're going to format this partition and we are going to make it boot all right give it a second to get itself together and you'll see this little tick here says that this for this partition will be formatted the next partition that we need to deal with is the root partition this is where our system is going to go we want ext4 for sure we want to format the partition and we want to mount that as root now a swap partition we shouldn't have to do anything with because the system will automatically use it because it's already there on the disk but I'll go ahead and click on here anyway and it says that it's already gonna use that for swap area so we're good to go now when we get to our home partition here's where all our data is and we don't want that to get lost so we're going to be very carefully here we're going to say we want to use this partition the partition is ext4 and we want to mount it as home but we do not want to click the option to format the partition no no no if we do that we'll lose all our data we'll end up having to completely reload the system anyway so let's go ahead and go forward and that all looks good you can double check here make sure that's not clicked to format and we will install now and it will give us this little message here and let us know which partitions are going to be formatted so you have three places here to make sure that you have this correct so do take the time to look and don't do this when you're being distracted don't do it when you're on the phone or your kids are jumping down up and down in the corner and as long as that all looks good and it does we will continue and it'll choose a time zone it got it right I am on the East Coast keyboard is us yes make sure that you choose all the same settings that you chose before and let's create our account and we can leave the name alone there and then we are going to put in a super safe password okay and we're going to choose not to encrypt the home partition because what if we want to do this again besides I'm not exactly sure how that would work since all the data is already there anyway so we'll just leave that one alone and yes I do like to have the system prompt me for a password when I log in it just makes it a little bit easier because if you don't do that at the moment that you click on your email or something it'll ask for it anyway so just give it to it upfront and it is more secure to run your system that way so what we're gonna do is we're gonna go ahead and let linux mint 17.3 get itself all installed and then I'm going to resume recording when we get to the point when it's time to reboot and we can look at our linux mint 17.3 installation and what we're going to see is whether we kept our files and our settings so stay tuned installation complete and now it is time to reboot the system and find out if we were able to retain our data and settings let's go ahead and restart the computer and then I'm gonna show you how to use the special tool that Linux Mint has to restore the software that you've previously had installed on the system when you replace the Linux distribution all of the software that you may have added to it or configured it's not going to be there so we need to put it back and if you're not running Linux Mint you can still do this through synaptic package manager or you can just keep a list of the software that you have installed and then you can go and get it and put it back on and the tool that I'm going to show you is not going to show you the software that you installed either from a Deb file or if you connected a PPA these are only the applications that came from the distributions repositories and it looks like we've kind of locked up on our shutdown here so I'm going to go ahead and just force the issue happens a lot when you're doing this in virtual machines and if it does it for real when you're installing then all you have to do is go ahead and force shut down the machine by holding down the power button for five seconds or unplugging it and then restarting it your system is installed there so let's take the DVD out I was actually doing this demonstration with a real DVD and we'll start and this is the first boot of our linux mint 17.3 installation that we put over Linux Mint 13 so exciting mmm it seems to be working this is good and the first food always takes a little bit longer and before we close this video gang I'll tell you about give you a couple more tips on this because this isn't the only scenario where you can use this but there are some things that you need to be aware of to avoid some strange conflicts that can come up so here we go we're loading the desktop it's so exciting alright let's go ahead and login so we know the installation was successful I don't know whether I can extend the stand the excitement much longer hurry up and load oh my goodness here we go so we have our desktop it didn't remember our wallpaper but that's no big deal you can always put that back where it was if you do your wallpaper from your own pictures I think that it will keep that so we do have our file that we created using the backup tool so we know for sure now that we can reinstall the software see if I click on that whether it'll automatically open it new it opens up the text editor but that's okay we'll just go get the backup tool and we'll do it manually so backup give it my super secure password alright and before we do that let me go ahead and increase the font size here make it a lot easier for everybody to see including me let's go ahead and make it 1.3 there that is better okay so what we want to do is we are going to restore software selection we're going to tell it where to look for the file here so we'll look in my home directory and we'll look on the desktop there's the file ok forward and it has a list of everything that it could find that was that's in the repositories now as compared to Linux Mint 13 so every now and again it might not be able to find something you might have installed a piece of software that's not currently available in the repositories but if you've added a lot of software to the system it certainly does help to go ahead and install what's there so let's go ahead and apply and then this is going to go out and do that and then while it does that I want to talk a little bit about could not apply changes for broken fix broken packages first I know what I did wrong need to go ahead and update this system because that's really the first thing that you need to do is run updates let's go ahead and do that because I was gonna tell you about that when you reinstall the system okay and you're just doing a reinstall so let's say that you're running Linux Mint and then for some reason another you decide that you just want to reload the computer maybe something breaks you can't fix it or you just want to freshen things up a little bit and you're going to go ahead and do this this way the next thing that you need to the first thing that you need to do before you do anything like install software or even open up the web browser is to go ahead and update the system because what can happen is that you will open up the software and then it won't be able to read the older configuration files in other words it's not down Lee or rather it goes the other way if you were running a newer piece of software and then you tried to open up an older version it'll get confused and it won't be able to read the old configuration files this happens a lot with browsers it happens with email clients and so therefore it's always good to make sure that you update the system and have it all up to date before you open anything up if you have retained the same data in the home folder the other thing to keep in mind here is that if you move from one distribution of Linux to another so let's say that you were running a boom - with the unity desktop and you wanted to install a boom - with the mattei desktop on it so you went from a bun to unity to a boom - mattei you may run into a situation where the two desktops the configuration files will it'll send some they won't be completely compatible so you might open something up and it'll be wonky or it'll say it can't read the configuration file or that sort of thing so that's something you have to keep in mind so this really works best if you're going to just stay on exactly the same desktop and even if it doesn't you can usually go in and delete those configuration files and then you can get it back to you know where it's usable if it's gnome 3 type desktops for instance you've got gnome 3 you've got unity you've got linux mint cinnamon they are all pretty much compatible you can go from one to the other and you might see some weird colors or things happening but the desktop will work and all of the settings should be there but the only time that I've ever had a major issue with this is like going from xfce to matei sometimes they kind of fight each other and also going from matei to unity or a gnome 3 base desktop sometimes they they fight each other so those are some things to keep in mind and what I like to do is to update the system but do it without even loading the desktop so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna pause the video I'm gonna let this system get itself up to date so we can go ahead and reinstall the software and then I'm gonna show you how to update the system without ever booting in to the desktop the system is up to date that took a little while to do seems that the Linux Mint mirrors are having some issues today wouldn't you know it that's because I'm recording a video but we got it done so let's see if that fixes our problem I'm going to go ahead and just restart the backup tool this is why I say do this when you can pay attention but from this point even if the backup tool doesn't work you could just go back and reinstall the applications and it'll be fine come across something you don't have just reinstall it's no big deal would be nice if this works though so let's see here okay so we need to go look on the desktop to get our file and hopefully this time around it will work and we'll go forward and we have our list of applications we're gonna assume that that's all what we want now let's apply it's doing something oh it is just not gonna work fix broken packages first I guess that would mean I would have to go through this list and figure out what was broken yeah so that turned out to be a bit of a bust didn't it gang you can certainly give it a try and if you were moving like from linux mint 17.3 2:18 and there wasn't so much time between the installs probably work out just fine this particular example that we're doing today we're moving from Linux Mint 13 from 2012 and we're trying to go to linux mint 17.3 which is way down the road so not that the tool wouldn't work but it's not gonna work in this video that is for sure no big deal you can go back and put your applications in manually if that doesn't work for you but I thought I would give it a try so before we close up the video I want to show you how you can update your system without ever starting the desktop up and this is a good idea especially if you are reinstalling let's say that you were reinstalling linux mint 17.3 well there's a lot of updates that have come in since then so if you just fire off the desktop and go ahead and open the thing up then what you're going to end up with is there may be some configuration file conflicts so we're gonna show you how to avoid that so what I'm gonna do is just log out and of course when you first start up Linux after you reinstall then it will present you with the login manager so what you would ordinarily do here of course at the login manager is to just type in your password and login well we're not gonna do that on your machine you would press alternate ctrl + f1 at this point do not login to the desktop and that will put you at a TTY which is a terminal that is spun up when Linux comes up and is always available to you and now we're going to log into the system here and we'll put in my super secure password and hopefully I typed it right of course I didn't type it right okay now we're all logged in so we're at a prompt here just like we're opened up a terminal that was on the desktop and the first thing that you want to do is to update the system so for Debian based systems this would include Debian and all the aboon twos and Linux Mint and everything else the command would be sudo apt update you ought to be familiar with this one and this goes out and it reads all of the update all of the repositories and it is going to see if there's any new packages and of course if you just installed there's probably going to be a bunch in this case there's not cuz I just now updated the system okay the next thing that we want to do is sudo apt dist upgrade and this will go out and get all of the packages that need to be updated on the system and there are a few because Linux Mint as you know holds back a few packages and if you run a dist upgrade command or distribution upgrade command then if this will actually go download them and install them on the system so this might be a good thing to do first thing when you install Linux Mint anyway here's just to make sure that you have everything completely upgraded and then use the update manager tool to keep up with that and then once every now and again run this to catch any packages that Linux Mint doesn't upgrade for some reason or the other or you can be super safe and secure and do things the Linux Mint way if you do things the Linux Mint way then you're not going to upgrade those packages that's entirely up to you Linux Mint will run fine for years without upgrading all of those packages so that's it gang thank you for watching the video I know this one was a little kind of all over the place but this is reality this is the way things really work you try things and they don't work and so you have to go to a plan B so don't be too shocked if you do this yourself and you might run across into something that might make you scratch your head every now and again but it's pretty easy to get yourself out of it sometimes when people do tutorials they give you a step by step and then the datura the tutorial is like you know everything is done this certain way and then when you do it it actually comes up being a little bit different which is actually more confusing so I kind of like it when in videos like this things don't always go exactly the way I thought they would because hey it's closer to reality but I hope it did you some good anyway thank you for watching be sure and check out easy Linux on the web check out easy Linux on Facebook and if you would give it a like and if you would also like to read more about Linux do check out freedom penguin comm for lots of really cool articles from contributors such as myself there's always something interesting to read about on freedom penguin so thank you for watching

Channel: Joe Collins

Views: 44,906

Rating: 4.8215008 out of 5

Keywords: Linux, Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Computer

Id: Ui5jBdTIuyI

Length: 42min 25sec (2545 seconds)

Published: Mon May 23 2016