In Linux Mint’s most recent blog post, they announced that they’ve been taking towards continuous integration in order to make it easier to develop Mint. They go into more detail about exactly how they are going about this and what it means in the blog post itself, and you can read all about it there. One thing that caught my attention is that they have already created a pre-alpha ISO for themselves. This ISO has not been publicly released; however, the repositories for both Linux Mint 19 and LMDE 3 are not only up and ready, but contain all the necessary meta-packages for a basic Linux Mint installation. After a bit of trial and error, I actually managed to get a working Linux Mint desktop by installing the desktop meta packages. For those of you who don’t know, Linux Mint provides three different meta packages that will provide you with all of the packages and preferences necessary for a complete Linux Mint experience. These three packages reflect the three editions of Linux Mint: mint-meta-cinnamon, mint-meta-mate, and mint-meta-xfce.

The installation procedure

I started by installing the most basic installation of Ubuntu possible from the mini ISO. I downloaded the 17.10 ISO, but which ISO you choose is pretty much irrelevant as we’re going to be upgrading to 18.04 anyway. This was pretty easy to do. I simply took the default sources.list file and replaced all of the instances of artful with bionic. One sudo apt upgrade later, and I was now using Ubuntu 18.04.

The next thing I did was add deb http://packages.linuxmint.com tara main upstream import backport to the bottom of the sources.list file. I installed a linuxmint-keyring .deb file that I cloned from a github project I created in order to get it onto the system without any major headaches, and then updated the repositories. Now I have access to all of the packages currently in the Linux Mint 19 repository. In order to get a graphical desktop environment I installed the packages mint-meta-cinnamon, mint-meta-xfce, slick-greeter, and xinit. Surely enough after a reboot, I had a graphical login screen.

Post-Installation Experience