Migrating Debian Wheezy to LMDE

My “mediacenter”, a small x86 machine plugged to the living-room TV was a diskless (PXE/NFS root) Debian Wheezy until the past week end. After having tried Linux Mint on a laptop of mine and being impressed by its integration quality, I decided to migrate my mediacenter to LMDE.

I did not reinstalled the system, mainly because Mint does not support debootstrap, instead I followed a couple of HOWTOs I found on their forums: this one and this one.

Those HOWTOs gave the main matter to initiate the migration, but I’ve been bitten by a couple of dependencies issues. One mainly: udev; long story short, Wheezy is still build around udev 175, while Mint have switched to systemd-udev 204. The simple solution is to apt-get purge udev. Yes this is violent as it will wipe mostly everything from udev to anything X-related, but that’s a good way of mintizing the previous Wheezy packages.

After that, apt-get install mint-meta-debian-cinnamon mint-info-debian-cinnamon should do the trick and you’ll be able to use Mint’s beautiful environment: cinnamon.

Of course, depending on how much packages you’ve installed, the upgrade pain may vary.