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adamhm: Updated
Nice. Thanx fot taking the time to keep this thread alive.

I switched to Ubuntu Mate, and it was a faultless experience, once I remembered to remove my external hdd. My mail opened without even asking my password O_o.
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adamhm: Now updated for Linux Mint 18
Is there anything in particular with 18 that makes it worth upgrading? Currently I have 17.1 Cinnamon. Not that knowledgeable with Linux, and since things work now, I've been concerned about trying to upgrade and risk breaking stuff. So I've not yet upgraded to 17.3. For this reason I don't want to upgrade to 18 either, although I see there isn't an upgrade path yet from 17.x (but should be out soon?). Also took a quick view at their forums the other day, and several people suggested a fresh install due to the big changes in 18. Sounded like much was changed under the hood.

Don't think I've upgraded since installing Mint (apart from normal updates), and have run it for maybe 2 years, but would like some advice here, whether it's worth giving it a go.

If I have to do a fresh install it might be a good opportunity to remove Windows entirely. Probably not started it for 2 years, but there is an ancient Windows 7 in there somewhere (which Microsoft will now be trying to force 10 upon me I suppose, however I'm not particularly interested in such grotesque spyware on the computer).
If 17.x does everything you need & there aren't any new features in Mint 18 that you particularly want then there's no real need to upgrade. The 17.x releases are all still going to be supported until 2019.

I also recommend doing a clean install as well if you want to upgrade from 17.x to 18... there is an upgrade path but it's a lot more complicated than normal due to the extent of changes between them- the 17.x releases all share the same Ubuntu 14.04 base, while Mint 18 uses Ubuntu 16.04 as its base. It's probably the biggest change between releases so far.
Thanks. No reason to upgrade in that case, as Mint 17.1 does what I want and I currently don't have any issues with it.
giving this amazing guide a bump!
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Pangaea666: For this reason I don't want to upgrade to 18 either, although I see there isn't an upgrade path yet from 17.x (but should be out soon?).
According to what I read, the upgrade option will be available next (this?) month. However, you will only be able to upgrade from Mint 17.3. So if you want to upgrade from 17.1 to 18, first you will need to upgrade to 17.3 and then 18. I havent seen anybody who recommended that.
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Pangaea666: For this reason I don't want to upgrade to 18 either, although I see there isn't an upgrade path yet from 17.x (but should be out soon?).
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Engerek01: According to what I read, the upgrade option will be available next (this?) month. However, you will only be able to upgrade from Mint 17.3. So if you want to upgrade from 17.1 to 18, first you will need to upgrade to 17.3 and then 18. I havent seen anybody who recommended that.
Sounds like that upgrade option is present now, I simply couldn't see it because I'm not on 17.3. Saw on the official forums that quite a few people had problems after doing 17.3 -> 18 upgrade, so it would be better to do a fresh install. But you know what they say, "don't fix what isn't broken" ;)
Hi! Continuing here this conversation from the giveaway thread. Let's see if the quoting somehow works... It's adamhm who I was talking with.

Lastly, my problem with Mint 18 is that the installer completely freezes my computer. The first couple of times I clicked the desktop icon and I thought the computer was just blocked reading the USB stick. When I saw it was actually stuck after a while I tried to run the installer from the command line to see the error messages. I tried to run ubiquity (right?), and as soon as I typed the command and pressed enter my computer instant-froze. No response to keyboard, mouse, nothing.
Does your system have an Nvidia GPU? The open source Nvidia drivers aren't very good and with certain GPUs can cause random freezes. There is a way around it/"safe mode" but it's probably not worth worrying about now since you have 17.3 installed & working ok.
No, I have an old AMD Radeon HD 7700. Anyway you gave me an idea and I've tried disabling it and using the motherboard's graphics chip. The result is the same, frozen system, so I don't think it's a graphics problem.

However this happens booting from the USB in compatibility mode. In UEFI mode (the default mode) the installer runs fine. The problem is I already have Windows 7 installed, and I get this scary message saying that Windows is installed using "BIOS compatibility mode" and if I install Mint in UEFI mode I might not be able to boot Windows anymore. This is the exact message (picture not mine, it comes from this reddit of somebody with the same problem).

I'm ok with making mistakes and reinstalling Mint over and over again :-D, but I have quite a lot of stuff in that Windows and I can't afford losing it. Therefore, to BIOS compatibility mode I go.

And that is a new level of pain. First, it will boot only from a USB 2.0 port (took a while to realise that), and most times it won't boot at all. Checking the media integrity works well, but when booting it blocks for minutes and finally gives read errors ("bad USB cable?", it says, which is simply not true). When it actually boots, it takes ages to launch the graphic desktop, whereas in UEFI mode that's instantaneous. And finally, the main problem is the Mint 18 installer doesn't work at all.

The same problems to boot in compatibility mode happen with Mint 17.3, but at least the few times it actually boots the installer works.

Anyway... Mint 17.3 is installed now, and The Witcher 2 is running, so all is well for now. This post is not really looking for answers to these obscure problems, but rather thinking aloud and bumping the guide :)
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nepundo: ..
Hey, Did you try redownloading the iso of Mint 18? I had a very annoying problem with Mint 17.2 and i downloaded the iso again and created an other bootable Flash disk. That solved all my problems.
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nepundo: Anyway... Mint 17.3 is installed now, and The Witcher 2 is running, so all is well for now. This post is not really looking for answers to these obscure problems, but rather thinking aloud and bumping the guide :)
Hi,
you could just upgrade to Mint 18 from 17.3, but since there are issues with the live version, it's safest to take a backup of all things you need.

Also AMD drivers for Mint's 18 X server are not available, so if you'd like to play games, I suggest to stay with Mint 17.3 for now.
Post edited August 02, 2016 by vanchann
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Engerek01: Hey, Did you try redownloading the iso of Mint 18? I had a very annoying problem with Mint 17.2 and i downloaded the iso again and created an other bootable Flash disk. That solved all my problems.
Yes, I've tried that and it doesn't work. It must be something with my hardware. Anyway I'm ok with 17.3 now. Thanks :)

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vanchann: Hi,
you could just upgrade to Mint 18 from 17.3, but since there are issues with the live version, it's safest to take a backup of all things you need.

Also AMD drivers for Mint's 18 X server are not available, so if you'd like to play games, I suggest to stay with Mint 17.3 for now.
Ok, good to know. Those are indeed additional reasons to stay with 17.3 for the moment :)
Post edited August 03, 2016 by nepundo
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nepundo: <snip>
Hmm, it does sound like a hardware/driver issue. I could suggest some possible fixes/workarounds, but as you've got Mint 17.3 working there's not much point - 17.3 will still be supported until 2019 anyway. If you haven't already, you might want to enable the firewall... in Mint 17.3 you either need to install the package "gufw" to install the GUI config tool or run the command "sudo ufw enable".

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vanchann: Also AMD drivers for Mint's 18 X server are not available, so if you'd like to play games, I suggest to stay with Mint 17.3 for now.
Drivers for AMD's GPUs *are* available for Mint 18, it's just that AMD have discontinued & are no longer supporting their proprietary Catalyst drivers (because they weren't very good & kept breaking), so the drivers for AMD GPUs on Mint 18 are the open source ones and the new AMDGPU & AMDGPU-PRO drivers (for GCN 1.2+ GPUs).

The latest open source drivers aren't that bad from what I can gather, and the new AMDGPU/AMDGPU-PRO drivers sound like they're a huge improvement but I can't test them myself as I don't have a GPU that can use them yet.
Post edited August 03, 2016 by adamhm
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adamhm: If you haven't already, you might want to enable the firewall... in Mint 17.3 you either need to install the package "gufw" to install the GUI config tool or run the command "sudo ufw enable".
Thank you, I will!

Today has been another fun day. After getting Mint 17.3 running on my desktop alongside Windows 7, my next endeavor is running a full Mint installation on my MacBook from an USB disk. (Not a live USB with persistence.)

After many hours of scratching my head and random fiddling because the Mac wouldn't recognize the USB disk with the already installed Mint as bootable (but the bastard recognized the live USB stick!), I've come across this excellent article about UEFI by another Adam and everything has clicked into place. Looks like explaining things clearly comes with the name :)

Then, knowing finally what I needed, it's been a matter of minutes to manually add an EFI partition to the disk and installing the boot loader (GRUB) following these steps (in case somebody else is interested in this setup, full installation on removable media).

Now I'm almost there. I've got a minor question that I'll leave for later, and a major problem that I'm afraid might require trying with another version/distro.

Anybody knows any workaround to the driver manager insisting in needing an internet connection when you're actually installing the wifi chipset driver from the installation USB?

Notice how in the first screenshot it recommends a driver that supposedly will be installed from the USB (whereas for the other 2 choices it explicitly requires internet connection). But later it actually tries to download stuff and fails (second screenshot).

I've read it might be a bug with Mint 17.3 exactly, but that was a random comment in a random blog post. Can I check somewhere that this is a bug?
Attachments:
before.png (253 Kb)
after.png (279 Kb)
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nepundo: Anybody knows any workaround to the driver manager insisting in needing an internet connection when you're actually installing the wifi chipset driver from the installation USB?

Notice how in the first screenshot it recommends a driver that supposedly will be installed from the USB (whereas for the other 2 choices it explicitly requires internet connection). But later it actually tries to download stuff and fails (second screenshot).

I've read it might be a bug with Mint 17.3 exactly, but that was a random comment in a random blog post. Can I check somewhere that this is a bug?
It doesn't look like it's included, but you could try downloading the packages for it from another system & copy it over. Try "apt-get download bcmwl-kernel-source libc-dev-bin libc6-dev" and then just copy the downloaded .deb files over to install manually