I've been stuck on lm15 for a while because I'm not sure how the upgrade path looks. I know with Ubuntu sometimes you had to re-install everything or you could run an upgrade without a reinstall, and with Arch Linux it was a rolling release.

How does an upgrade with Linux Mint work?

I have never been a fan of upgrades in Linux. If you want it to work then backup, test backup and then do new install. Apply back static data.

The ubuntu web pages tell mostly how one can attempt an upgrade. In Mint you'd have to get rid of medibuntu sources if you didn't already.

My understanding is that Mint does not officially support in-place version upgrades; that's why there's no invitation for users to upgrade online, in contrast with Ubuntu's practice; unless something has changed, they recommend a full install. I must say I have never had a Ubuntu (when I was using Ubuntu) or Debian version upgrade go awry.

If you want to try it, these links may help, but back up your data as if you were planning to reinstall from scratch. (Actually, that's good practice even up doing version upgrades from distros that support them such as Debian, Ubuntu, and Mageia. Something can always go wrong.) The worst that can happen is that you have to reinstall from scratch.

It's also probably not a good idea to try to jump two versions, but to go one at a time.

http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/2

http://www.tecmint.com/upgrade-linux...mint-16-petra/

http://www.tecmint.com/upgrade-linux...linux-mint-17/

1 members found this post helpful.

Generally I too have always re-installed Ubuntu based distros. But I wouldn't care about jumping 2 releases - in fact I've just noticed a Mint14 in the house. Might see if I can get herself off that laptop and do an upgrade this weekend.

Let us know how it goes. Your experience might help someone else.

Easy.
I took the opportunity to split off /home as a separate partition so I could keep the same users (and data) without having to backup/restore just for this install. Also created a separate partition for Mint17 - I will flip-flop between the "system" partitions in subsequent upgrades.

Everything went as expected, no issues. Grub installed to the MBR and found both the old Mint14 and new Mint17 kernels in addition to the Win7 (all on the same SSD).
Primary user had her F/F bookmarks and Thunderbird mail available immediately without having to do anything once the user was defined during the install.

Am I correct in gathering that you installed Mint 17 alongside Mint 15, rather than upgrading the Mint 15 load?

That is correct - as I said above, I don't use the upgrade. Was just illustrating a reinstall will work fine with the current array of installed software. Although I jumped directly from Mint14 to Min17.

Thanks.

Glad everything is working.