I realized recently that my desktop system is quite out of date. It has worked so well for so long that I didn’t realize for a while that it was end of support. I was running Linux Mint 16 – Petra.

Thanks to this site the upgrade was fairly painless – a few repository updates, upgrade, and reboot. Simple! The steps I took are below

Update all repositories

Use sed in conjunction with find to quickly and easily update all your repository files from saucy to trusty, and from petra to rebecca, making a backup of files modified.

sudo find /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ -type f -exec sed --in-place=.bak 's/saucy/trusty/' {} \;
sudo find /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ -type f -exec sed --in-place=.bak 's/petra/rebecca/' {} \;

Update your system

This took a while. It had to download 1.5GB of data and install it.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get upgrade

Cleanup

After running the upgrade I had a notice that I had many packages that were installed but no longer required. To remove unnecessary packages after the upgrade:

sudo apt-get autoremove

Install new language settings:

sudo apt-get install mintlocale

Install gvfs-backends (for Thunar)

sudo apt-get install gvfs-backends

Reboot

Flawless! It worked on the first try. Awesome.