Comment 2 for bug 543891

Hi B Bobo,

It's not really a bug so I'll be closing this report, but you need an explanation nonetheless.

- About Debian, the format of the packages (.deb) is compatible across Mint, Ubuntu and Debian. But the packages (their name, structures, dependencies) are only compatible between Mint and Ubuntu, so it's alright to install a few individual Debian packages into Mint, now and then, but if you're going to pin repositories and mix things up between Mint/Ubuntu and Debian you're most definitely going to break things :)

- About the partitions. The first time, you only had Windows. So the installer suggested to create a new set of partitions and so that's what it did. The second time, although you wanted to overwrite Linux with a new installation, the installer saw that you had Windows and Linux and it assumed that you wanted to add yet another Linux system to end up with Windows + Linux (1) + Linux (2).. if that makes sense. What you needed to do was to choose the "custom partitioning" option in the installer, that way you could have simply indicated to the installer that you wanted the new system to be installed on the already existing Linux partition.