Change linux mint to ubuntu

I have installed Linux Mint and now I want to change it to Ubuntu but I have a lot of apps and information on it.

Is there any way to get Ubuntu without losing data? Or how to back up my information and apps, then install a fresh Ubuntu and copy the backup on it?

3 Answers 3

TL;DR It is possible, but very difficult.

The method below is presented without any warranty. Use it on your own risk.

LinuxMint MATE 18.3 (Sylvia) -> Ubuntu Xenial Xerus 16.04 LTS

I have had installed LinuxMint MATE 18.3 (Sylvia). I asked myself a question — is it possible to convert it to normal Ubuntu Xenial Xerus 16.04 LTS without reinstallation?

I found great answer with script for listing packages from known repository. I adapted it to my situation:

Then ran it to find Mint packages and remove them:

Then rebooted and launched Aptitude with sudo aptitude .
Set all packages from Obsolete and Locally Created Packages section to purge.

And checked locally installed package with:

So I reinstalled two packages listed here — bash and base-files from xenial-updates repository from terminal:

Then purged all packages that does not have ii state (such as rc ) with:

Remove Mint files from home directory:

Check system integrity with debsums :

Then I checked system for files, that are not from Ubuntu repositories:

Removed the following objects:

And finally installed Ubuntu MATE desktop:

Reboot and I have nearly normal Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 LTS 🙂

LinuxMint MATE 19 (Tara) -> Ubuntu Bionic Beaver 18.04 LTS

Warning: this method was not tested. Based on 18.3 -> 16.04 LTS above.

Let’s do a listing of packages from known repository:

Find Mint packages and remove them:

Launch Aptitude with sudo aptitude .
Set all packages from Obsolete and Locally Created Packages section to purge.

Check locally installed packages with:

Reinstall two (maybe more!) packages listed here — bash and base-files from bionic-updates repository from terminal:

Then purge all packages that does not have ii state (such as rc ) with:

Remove Mint files from home directory:

Check system integrity with debsums :

Then check system for files, that are not from Ubuntu repositories:

Remove the following objects (may be other!):

And finally install Ubuntu MATE desktop:

Reset MATE desktop settings to the defaults:

Install MATE Welcome and Software Boutique as Snaps:

Reboot and have nearly normal Ubuntu Bionic 18.04 LTS 🙂

LinuxMint MATE 20 (Ulyana) -> Ubuntu Focal Fossa 20.04 LTS

Let’s do a listing of packages from known repository:

Find Mint packages and remove them:

Launch Aptitude with sudo aptitude .
Set all packages from Obsolete and Locally Created Packages section to purge.

Check locally installed packages with:

Reinstall two (maybe more!) packages listed here — bash and base-files from focal-updates repository from terminal:

Then purge all packages that does not have ii state (such as rc ) with:

Remove Mint files from home directory:

Check system integrity with debsums :

Then check system for files, that are not from Ubuntu repositories:

Remove the following objects (may be others!):

And finally install Ubuntu MATE desktop on first login:

Reset MATE desktop settings to the defaults:

Install MATE Welcome and Software Boutique as Snaps:

Reboot and have nearly normal Ubuntu Focal 20.04 LTS 🙂

1) Backup to an external drive your applications to a list in a text file which you’ll need later, and follow this method when it comes to restoring them on Ubuntu.

2) Backup to an external drive your data using rsync, or it’s GUI equivalent Grsync command.

3) Back up to an external drive your home directory (again with rsync ). This is more tricky to restore on Ubuntu as you’ll need to find the UUID after Ubuntu installation and ensure it’s correctly entered in the fstab file, or it won’t mount at boot-up.

4) You can also back up all Debian repositories. I understand Mint uses the same ones as Ubuntu (except Canonical). These will be restored in the /etc/apt folder .

5) Install Ubuntu from Live UFD, making partitions for home, swap, and root. Restore home folder contents to newly made home partition and check UUID configuration in fstab as in 3). You will likely have to make a new entry for it. Restore apps and data files as in 1 — 2.

Источник

How to change the default application for a type of file on Linux

This howto explains how to change the default program to open all files with a given extension on Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Debian, and most Linux distributions. It also details how to change the default application for a batch of filetypes, for example all audio files or all video files.

Set the default program for a given filetype

1. In Nemo / Nautilus / Caja, right-click on any file with the desired file type or extension, choose “Properties” from the context menu.

2. The “Properties” dialog appears. Click on the “Open With” tab.

3. Select the desired application for the given filetype. All files with the same extension will now be opened with this program by default.

On Linux Mint, replace step one and two choosing “Open With” → “Other Application…” in the contextual menu, as seen in the picture above.

Change the default app for multiple filetypes

Changing the default application for one type of file is really easy, while changing a batch of file type associations reveals a little clumsier, but extremely efficient.

These instructions should work with a large spectrum of Linux flavours, please share your experience with your favorite distribution in the comments.

Associate all audio and video files to VLC instead of Totem media player (Movie Player)

Video files: .avi .mp4 .mpg .ogv .ogm .mkv .wmv etc.
Audo files: .mp3 .ogg .flac .wav .wma etc.

Open defaults.list with gedit:
gksudo gedit /usr/share/applications/defaults.list

And replace all occurrences of totem with banshee/rythmbox/vlc or the media player of your choice.
(Search → Replace → Replace All)

Save the modified file, and you’re done! Change are effective immediately.

Associate all office documents to LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice.org or Abiword

Office files: .odt .ods. .doc .docx .xls .xlsx etc.

Open defaults.list with gedit:
gksudo gedit /usr/share/applications/defaults.list

And replace all occurences of “openoffice.org” with “libreoffice”.
(Search → Replace → Replace All)

Finally, save the file. No need to restart, you’re all set!

Other file associations

Use the same technique to change the default application for all kind of file types or extensions, for example:

all pictures (.jpg, .png, .gif, etc.) should open up with gThumb instead of EOG/Eye of Gnome/Image Viewer
all html documents should open with Firefox instead of Chrome
all pdf files should open with Adobe Reader instead of Evince/Document Viewer.

Different solution for some Ubuntu versions

For an obscure reason, changing the file associations directly in the defaults.list doesn’t seem to work on some Ubuntu versions. Nevertheless, importing information to the the mimeapps.list works.

The file associations for each user are stored in:

In Ubuntu this file is almost empty. Let’s import informations from
/usr/share/applications/defaults.list

Display all the video MIME types / Media types associations with this command:
cat /usr/share/applications/defaults.list | grep video

Append all the lines containing video types to the local file:
cat /usr/share/applications/defaults.list | grep video >>

Open defaults.list with gedit:
gedit

And replace all occurrences of totem with vlc (Search → Replace…) Proceed similarly for audio files if needed. Unlike the standard method described at the beginning of this article, this method permits to assign a separate program to audio or to video files.

By Johannes Eva, January 2011 – November 2019

This article has been linked on LXer.com, Linux Today and some more…

How to install LibreOffice 7.2 on Linux Mint,… This article describes how to install LibreOffice 7.2 on Debian/Ubuntu-based Linux distributions, such as Linux Mint,…
Multimedia, codecs, MP3 & DVD support on CentOS,… This tutorial details how to install full multimedia support, media codecs, MP3 & DVD support on…
Sudo on CentOS / Scientific Linux / RHEL This short howto is about setting up sudo on Red Hat Entreprise Linux and its derivates…
Install VirtualBox on CentOS / RHEL / Scientific Linux This how-to is about installing VirtualBox on CentOS. Provided instructions should also work on Scientific Linux…
Install Flash Player directly from Adobe on Linux… Adobe Flash Player freezes constantly on my Ubuntu installation, sometimes crashing Firefox. Most of the time…
How to edit image metadata on Linux Image metadata is a complex field with multiple standards, the most important among them being Exif,…
How to Sync Fonts Between Linux Devices This small guide is about syncing fonts between two or more Linux devices, for example one…

3 Comments

I have .wma audio files showing as text files. It doesn’t help to use “open with” a media player because Mint thinks they’re text docs so nothing happens. Weirdly, one song in one folder IS still an audio file – and plays fine. Is there a global way to wipe out file associations and then re-associate via terminal?

In my Debian Jessie system, the per user settings are at: $HOME/.config/mimeapps.list

Helped me setting PDF files to be opened with Atril instead of Gimp (Ubuntu MATE 14.04). Thank you.

How to dual boot Ubuntu and Linux Mint

Dual boot Ubuntu and Linux Mint | Dual booting two GNU/Linux distros.

Requirements

When someone mentions dual boot, often it’s referred to dual booting a GNU/Linux distro and Windows, or Windows and MAC OS X. In this post we will dual boot two Linux distributions and show you step by step how it’s done. This time we will show you how to dual boot Ubuntu and Linux Mint on a single drive. In this example, Ubuntu is pre-installed and we installed Linux Mint afterwards and setup the dual boot.

The process can be done vice versa since both systems are based on the same distributions and have the same installation. You can also check out tutorials how to dual boot these systems with Windows 10 following these links Dual boot Linux Mint and Windows 10, Dual boot Ubuntu and Windows 10.

Please note, before you proceed if you already use GNU/Linux as your daily driver on your PC, backup everything first.

Requirements for this process:

Empty space on HDD
Linux mint bootable USB

Underneath is also a video tutorial for this process:

Procedure

Starting Linux Mint installation

Plug in your bootable Linux mint USB, restart the PC and boot the Live CD. Once the Live CD is booted up, start the installation.

First two screen will be prompts to setup your language and keyboard layout.

On this screen, installation will prompt you to install additional drivers, codecs etc. This is usually recommended step to do.

Formating partitions and dual boot setup

This is a very important screen. On this screen we need to choose how Linux Mint will install. The most easiest option is the first one. As we can see here, Linux Mint installation already detected that Ubuntu is pre-installed. This means that Linux Mint installation will prepare the OS and install Linux Mint alongside Ubuntu without harming and affecting installed Ubuntu and the files you have on it. That’s why we will choose the first option.

On this screen, we need to setup partitions and hard disk space. The process is here simple. In the first field we need to select drive on which we are installing Linux Mint. Since, this is situation where we have only one HDD, our only one drive will be selected. Bellow is a graphic representation of our Ubuntu OS and Linux Mint installation and how much space they have or will get after we finish setting up the partitions.

By default, the installation will divide hard disk space in 50:50 for each OS. In order to allocate more hard disk space to one OS, we just need to move mouse cursor in between the borders of our two OS installations, that border is a slider and we need to move it to one side.

After we finished setting the partitions, click continue and we will get a prompt with a pop up and it will ask us to confirm the changes.

User account setup

Next step is to setup the user account and and computer name.

After you setup the user account, the installation will start and it will take some time. Usually it takes around 15 minutes to finish but all that will depend of the HDD we have.

Once the installation is finished, we’ll get a prompt a again and it will ask to restart the PC. Remove the bootable USB and restart the PC.

FInishing up

As soon as the PC restarts, we need to have this screen. This is the GRUB bootloader. On this menu we choose which OS we want to boot.

So, if you get this screen, it means that you succeeded in setting up the dual boot and have installed the Linux Mint.

Summary

This was the process how to dual boot Ubuntu and Linux Mint. Thanks to installers of Linux and Ubuntu the process is nowadays simple to execute but still it’s important to mention again to watch out on which partition you’re installing which system and always have backup ready.

Источник

Change linux mint to ubuntu