Linux Mint doesn’t like the Ubuntu method of upgrading. They tell you all the bad things that can happen and why they think nuking your partition is a far better idea in their upgrade instructions.

In principal they may be right, but when things go wrong during the install they are far harder to recover from – as I’m discovering…

I seem to be running into the squashfs issue, but the solution listed in the post I found about it seems out of date. My USb stick was mounted as /cdrom/ and so I ran

cd /cdrom/ && md5sum --check md5sum.txt;

The results showed what I feared.

./casper/filesystem.squashfs: FAILED

Hunting around I eventually found where the locations were set (/usr/share/ubiquity/install.py), but short of editing that file it wasn’t clear to me where I could set an alternative path for the squashfs image to be stored. There’s likely a way to do it, but some web searches failed to turn it up (I did the searches from Mint Live by going direct to Google as the default search engine in Mint is DuckDuckGo which I find consistently hopeless).

My previous attempt at installing failed when the machine froze totally and so I’ve now rebooted and am trying again. If the same happens again I’ll have to seriously consider whether to carry on with Mint or whether to revert back to Ubuntu which despite having many issues was at least rock solid on this machine.

UPDATE:
After many attempts and several different USB sticks I finally found one that worked. The fact that I had to go through so many attempts is ridiculous and seriously dents my faith in Mint as a viable long term solution for this laptop.

I’m now running Mint 13 with the Cinnamon desktop and it’s an improvement from Mint 12 with Mate. I can’t help but wonder why Ubuntu can’t offer a similar desktop for their users…

UPDATE 2:
The more I use the new Cinnamon desktop the more I’m coming to appreciate how user friendly it is. It’s fast, responsive and does everything that I’ve needed it to do so far. This updated Mint has also cured a few of the minor niggles that plagued my experience with Mint 12.