Configuring Linux Mint Maya 13 (Ubuntu 12 Precise) in 2025

Recently, I restored an old ThinkPad. In addition to upgrading the RAM and installing an SSD, I replaced Windows with Linux. The most recent version that worked on that machine was Mint 13 (Maya).

While that distribution no longer receives security updates and generally should be avoided, if you do have a very old machine, here’s how to get it running:

Installing and updating packages was failing because the servers supplied in the default /etc/apt/sources.list file were no longer active.

The Linux Mint community forums had posts from 2014 and 2017 but neither worked completely. Here’s what works today:

deb http://mirrors.usinternet.com/mint/packages/ maya main upstream import backport
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu/ precise partner

Now update your packages:

apt update
apt dist-upgrade -y

Next, you’ll need a working browser. The latest version of Firefox ESR that runs is 60.9. To install Firefox:

apt remove firefox -y
wget https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/60.9.0esr/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-60.9.0esr.tar.bz2
tar xjf firefox-60.9.0esr.tar.bz2
rm firefox-60.9.0esr.tar.bz2
sudo mv firefox /opt

Make sure to disable Firefox automatic updates or you’ll end up with a broken browser. Later versions require libatomic.so.1, which is not part of that Ubuntu distribution.

To connect to modern websites, you’ll need a up-to-date set of certificates. The 2011 certificate store is no longer useful.

On a machine running a current version of Ubuntu:

• download the current ca-certificates packages
• extract the contents
• change the version number
• rebuild the package

wget --no-check-certificate https://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/c/ca-certificates/ca-certificates_20250419_all.deb
mkdir -p ca-certificates/DEBIAN
dpkg -x ca-certificates_20250419_all.deb ca-certificates
dpkg -e ca-certificates_20250419_all.deb ca-certificates/DEBIAN

Edit the ca-certificates/DEBIAN/control file and make three changes:

• Set Version to 20111211
• Set Depends to openssl (>= 1.0.0), debconf (>= 0.5) | debconf-2.0
• Remove the line starting with Breaks

Now rebuild the package:

sudo chown -R root:root ca-certificates
sudo dpkg-deb --build -Zgzip ca-certificates

Copy ca-certificates.deb to your Mint 13 machine and install:

dpkg -i ca-certificates.deb