This computer had LinuxMint 13 Cinnamon i.e. Nadia installed and had a smooth run for almost an year. Suddenly Cinnamon crashed and x-window fell back upon classic genome 2.0. Instead of wasting time I decided to upgrade it to Olivia or Mint 15. Unfortunately there is no easy way to upgrade. Very unlike Ubuntu, in which if option is selected, update manager offers to upgrade. Now the option is to do it manually. Barring few problems this is how it was possible.First create a bootable USB with Unetbootin. (Or by DD)
1. Now here was a mistake on my part. I created a persistent USB with 50 mb reserved. Installation crashed. Make sure not to make persistent USB.

2. Installation does not work without Internet and crashes. Make sure that Internet is connected during installation.

3. Third problem was that I used same old home folder, where Nadia was installed, without formatting it. Installer did warn in an assuring tone that all previous files will be replaced with new files. After installation the system did boot but was limping. It simply refused to install any new program. Most existing programs had also disappeared.

4. It was time for hard decision. Clean install. I manually copied few config folders and installed Mint 15, afresh on a formatted root and home folder.

5. The installation was smooth and quick. But there was one problem. The graphics were slow. Videos would skip frames. Text files in browser had difficulty in rolling over. It made me worried that something wicked happened. But the graphics card was properly detected. It was ATI Radeon 2100 an old legacy. I detected the card by using command:

 'inxi -Fx'

6. Trying ‘sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade’ did not help. Almost by speculation rather than by logic, I decided to go for kernel upgrade by:

'sudo apt-get dist-upgrade'

And it worked. The graphic problem is resolved. Would somebody tell what was the bug?

© Sandeep Bhalla