today i saw a new version of linux mint was announced. i had linux mint 13 installed in a VM and went to look for an easy GUI upgrade utility. interesting enough, there doesn’t appear to be one. after some googling around it appears that the linux mint community recommends upgrading by CD.

that’s kind of lame. however, you can still go about the unrecommended method of upgrading by:
editing /etc/apt/sources.list and swapping out the release names of mint and ubuntu to the latest
then
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade 

update 11/21/12 (later in the day):
the apt-get dist-upgrade method worked fine except for one snag. apt-get got hung up on installing the kernel shipped with mint 14. evidently mint 14 has dropped support for non-pae cpus. so i shutdown the VM and enabled PAE (on the VM) booted back up and resumed the upgrade.