TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

I must confess to a good bit of laziness with some of my rants. Most of the time I have to run through the whole install process twice; once in a host OS using Virtualbox to get screenshots, and once for the real install.

Sometimes, if the OS doesn't really impress me all that much I just skip that second step and give my impressions off the virtual machine install. The downside to this is I don't always get to see how a distribution stacks up against my native hardware (such as my Nvidia card).

For Linux Mint, I went whole hog and installed it on the laptop in a spare partition. Why? Well, I'd had Ubuntu on that partition for ages, and Mint is stable enough that I'm not worried it would hose everything. It's also different enough to catch my attention.

Around the time I decided to write this, a community edition of Mint came out with KDE 4. I downloaded it and played around a bit, but in the end it wasn't really what I wanted to look at on my laptop. This rant is for the standard, Gnome edition of Mint.

Install:

Mint's installer isn't much different than the regular Ubuntu one. It works, end of story. I ran through my usual set of options and let it go. There was one deviation from my usual scenario, however.

I decided on a lark to try out the migration assistant. It claimed to be able to transfer documents and settings from my Windows 7 partition into Mint. I've tried this on Ubuntu (with Windows XP) before and had no luck, so I was curious to see if Mint would pull it off.

A reboot, refresh, update, and reboot later I had my newly-installed Mint desktop to play with. I immediately checked my Documents and Firefox settings to see if they'd indeed migrated.

My Documents were migrated, much to my surprise. Unfortunately my Firefox settings were not. This feature continues to be hit and miss for me. I'm glad Mint was able to score one hit though.

Mint correctly identified my Nvidia card and installed the driver using the Ubuntu "Hardware Drivers" app. This has worked well since about Ubuntu 7.10, so there's not much to report there. I still remember a time when Nvidia drivers required me to kill X Windows and run a console script.

Software Selection:

Firefox, GIMP, and Pidgin were present along with OpenOffice. Mint has several unique utilities (mintInstall, mintUpdate, mintBackup, and mintNanny) that do about what you'd expect from their names.

There's also Control Center, which groups some common administrative tasks into a menu for you. Java and GCC were installed.

Multimedia was pretty standard Gnome, with the notable exception of MP3 and WMV playback support, which worked out of the box.

Version 7 of MintInstall only downloads a small number of screenshots by default and retrieves new ones as you select various applications. This is an improvement over past implementations where all the shots were downloaded en masse every time you launched the program.

Unfortunately, as soon as I hit the Refresh button I had to once again wait around 10 minutes while 448 screenshots were downloaded. That was annoying. If I hadn't had my work T1 line it might have taken significantly longer.

I sought to rectify the dearth of games on the default Mint install by pulling down Frozen Bubble and Battle for Wesnoth. The former I can and have played for hours; the latter I keep telling myself I'll try to learn because it's so darned pretty.

Using MintInstall I found what I was looking for. Regular old Synaptic is also available if that just floats your boat. The programs downloaded and installed properly. My only complaint is that unlike Synaptic, there's no option (at least that I can see) for selecting multiple programs to download at once.

I had to find one app, click Install and let it do its thing, then find the second and go through the whole process again. I'd rather have a check box I can tick and then do the whole shebang in one go.

Conclusion:

I like Mint. I've liked it pretty regularly throughout all its iterations, despite the occasional annoyance (thumbnail loading). Version 7 is a solid distro that takes Ubuntu and improves upon it like a good spin-off should. I look forward to version 8.

In closing, the best compliment I can give this distribution is that I'm running it. It now has the coveted one spare partition on my laptop. It wasn't confined to a VM on a host environment and then summarily wiped like so many others. I stuck with it because it worked well for me. Perhaps it will do the same for some of you.