Upgrading Ubuntu 10.04, Step 3: 14.04 to Mate desktop

Our upgrade process is almost complete - the time-consuming steps of running do-release-upgrade twice was performed in previous steps (Step 1 and Step 2.

For this final step, we install the Mate desktop to replace Unity.

First things first: this test is running in a virtual machine (VM) instead of on real hardware. And advantage is that we can take a snapshot of the state of the VM so that if things go wrong, we can revert.

Okay, snapshot / backup made, here's what we're starting with:

Ready to start. The Mate Desktop Wiki is our guide - they probably explain things better than I do. And a giant thank-you to Martin Wimpress for his development work and his guest spots on the following podcasts: Linux Luddites, MintCast, LAS Unplugged.

Let's add the repositories (repos) with the following two commands:

One done, one to go:

We've already done that command recommended in the last line above!

Again, we've already run the first command, and we're running that second command right now. (Odd that the output of a command is to... run that command. Huh.)

To continue with the output of the last command:

As per the advice above, an update of the repo cache and an upgrade of the software is recommended next; we'll do that momentarily with sudo apt-get update ; sudo apt-get upgrade.

Finally, do we want a vanilla Mate desktop, or an Ubuntu-branded one?

From the Mate Wiki again:

Ubuntu MATE is a more comprehensive option that offers a slightly tweaked layout, configuration, and themes to integrate into Ubuntu in a more seamless fashion. This will install the complete MATE Desktop Environment as well as LightDM and numerous other applications to provide a full and well rounded desktop.

The output from the last command above gives instruction to install the Ubuntu version via sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends ubuntu-mate-core ubuntu-mate-desktop.

I think it best to choose the Ubuntu Mate version as recommended.

Once it's been screen-shot-captured, perhaps I'll roll-back the VM snapshot and install the Vanilla Version to screen shot it too, for comparison.

So, per last output pasted above, as always, running as root (saves us tying "sudo" a bunch of times, and providing passwords frequently) :

Uh-oh, looks like running via SSH caused a minor problem, but I doubt it's a game-stopper.

That took a rather long time, but at the end:

We can clean some stuff up:

Really, we want to clean out Unity to save a bunch of space.

After a restart:

But there's more Unity cruft sitting around, so try to get rid of all of it:

I cut the packaage list out from above (all 96 of them).

Rebooting brought up a warning about corrupted graphics:

I chose to run in reduced graphics mode and got the nice Mate login screen:

Below is our new, lovely Mate desktop on Ubuntu 14.04