TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

I was very impressed with the last version of Linux Mint. There were very few things I didn't like about it, and they mostly dealt with missing packages. I was excited when I heard of the new version to see if any of my beefs had been addressed. I'm also interested to see if Linux Mint can keep up the bar they set with 3.2. Here we go.

Install:

The boot screen and loading splash were pleasant to look at, which is a trait I've come to expect from Linux Mint. One of the new features listed for 4.0 is that it comes with 3D effects enabled by default. This always makes me leery since it's almost guaranteed to be the first point of failure.

Once the LiveCD environment booted I ran the installer. It's a standard Ubuntu install, pretty much identical to Gutsy. I chose my partitions, time zone, and set up a user and everything ran as expected.

After the install and reboot, I was taken to a graphical login and given the option to enable root user. I chose not to, but it's nice to be asked (something Ubuntu doesn't do).

I was also asked whether or not I wanted a fortune displayed every time I opened the terminal. I've never cared much for fortunes, so I turned this feature off. Again, it was nice to be asked.

I was put off initially by the default start menu behavior. This reminded me of SLED, and I prefer a more traditional list of applications to navigate. I immediately tried to change it, only to find that right clicking on the start menu and choosing "Preferences" brought up a window that let me edit hex values and boolean flags for GNOME. This reminded me (once again in a negative way) of the MS Windows registry editor. Not the most intuitive thing in the world.

After some playing around with it, however, I discovered that the menu was actually almost the same as your standard applications list with an extra panel added to the left hand side. Also, when browsing the sub-menus of applications rather than a new menu popping up, the menu on the right simply redraws to show its contents. I can live with that.

MP3/WMV8/MPG support worked fine out of the box. There was no scanner software, so that was a no go.

Software Selection:

I noted happily that GCC was installed by default. So was Java 1.6 from Sun. Unfortunately the libc headers were *not* installed, so I couldn't install my Nvidia drivers offline.

The rest of the software included was the usual collection of office suite (OpenOffice), Firefox, Pidgin, and GIMP along with a handful of unique apps (Envy, a utility to install 3D drivers). The Ubuntu "Restricted Driver Manager" was also included. I've found that tool to be useful for wireless and 3D drivers, provided you have a wired internet connection handy.

The "mintUpdate" application is basically the same as Ubuntu's update manager, but just looks prettier to me. Beauty is subjective, I know. This program just looks more solid and attractive. It also doesn't default to a skinny column on the left hand side of the screen like Ubuntu.

"Software Portal" is from what I gather similar to Linspire's Click N Run service. It launches a search box where you can enter the name of a program you want, which it then searches for on the web and brings you to a results page on the Linux Mint site. You can choose a package if one is available and it gives you a description and the option to install with one click.

This downloads a ".mint" file that then installs your program. I tried this with Eclipse just out of curiosity and it seemed to work. I would have preferred if they used a more standard package format like DEB, but still it's a neat feature.

Who's it best for?

There's not a lot to say about this distribution. It's stable, like Ubuntu, but it has several bells and whistles which make it more useful than its parent distribution.

It's still missing a few things that I personally would like (a *full* gcc installation and 3D drivers out of the box). These aren't show-stoppers by any means, but I'm still annoyed that so much of I want is installed on this distribution by default...EXCEPT that.

If you're installing this on a box without internet, don't expect 3D drivers to install properly. You're getting Ubuntu with multimedia support and a handful of useful utilities. Nothing more, nothing less.