My wife and I are just back from a short vacation to the sleepy little island of Isla Mujeres Mexico. Somehow I have managed to spend fifty three years on this earth without ever tasting a Mojito. What a mistake! There is very little that can beat sitting at an outdoor restaurant wrapped in the evening August heat of Mexico and sipping on a Mojito with fresh mint leaves floating in the drink. My point is that mint makes a Mojito the perfect drink, the Mint Linux makes Ubuntu the perfect distro. Not a Windows killer, but I have not doubt that even a novice Windows user could find their way around Mint.
I had tried earlier versions of Mint and liked them but no matter how hard I tried I just could not get use to Gnome. I am accustom to KDE where just about everything is tweakable and felt stifled by the lack of of options in Gnome. So I used Mint for a while but always eventually installed a distro with KDE in place of Mint.
I saw that there was a KDE version of Mint so I decided to install it on a whim, per my previous post, I though Freespire 2.0 was the coolest thing since Sony invented the Walkman, so I installed Mint on a free partition. Everything I thought about Freespire was multiplied by ten in Mint. After using Mint for about half an hour I moved my files from Freespire to Mint. Mint has the functionality of Freespire, but it is much more polished.
Download
There are five different versions of Mint 3.0 (Cassandra) that you can download. There are two Gnome versions to download, two KDE versions and a lightweight XFCE version. I opted for the mini KDE download, I hate it when the distro installs two gig worth of crap, most of which I will never use. I wish every flavor of Linux had a single install CD.
Installation
The Mint installation is pretty much a standard Ubuntu installation, the one thing I like about the Mint installation is it allows you to install grub in the root partition rather than the MBR via an advanced button. I am scratching my head, did I miss the advanced option in the Ubuntu install or Freespire install that allows you to install grub in the root partition? I don't think so, but it is possible. I am reasonable sure that Mint is the only one of the three distros that gives you the option. In my opinion (that would I am a non-programmer I don't want to muck around with grub), it is better to install grub in the root partition and use a commercial boot loader to dual, triple, quadruple boot.
Mint is a live Cd with an install options. This is a nice option, you can get an idea if your hardware will work with the Linux version without wasting your time trying to install it. However, I have had everything work in the live CD but when I installed it I ran into hardware problems. Likewise, I have had wireless cards that did not work in the Live CD but did when I installed to the hard drive.
There was a problem with the installer when Cassandra was first release, the work around is here. They have since fixed the problem and they have updated the ISO so the installer on your ISO should work unless you downloaded your ISO shortly after it was released.
When I performed the install I had an existing installation so I did not try to create a new partition, I just edited the existing partition and that went without a hitch. There is no package selection, you get everything that is on the CD. I did not time the install but it definitely took less than twenty minutes. All of my hardware including my D-Link DWL-G650 wireless card were correctly detected. I actually got the network working while I was running the live CD, that hasn't always been the case with other live CDs.
After the install is finished it gives you the option of continuing to work or to reboot and use your brand new Mint installation.
Using Mint
This is what your Mint desktop looks like, more or less, I like a translucent task bar.I don't think Freespire 2.0 is bad, I just don't think it is not as professional as Mint. The one thing I like about Mint is the very brave decision they made to include Tasty Menu by default. Suse has a similar menu and a lot of people railed against it when they included it in their last release. I actually like it a lot, I wish it was more configurable, I think part of the kicker should be reserved so the user can put short cuts to programs, documents, jpgs, or what ever they use the most. I know that in tasty menu you can list the most recent programs, most used programs, recent documents etc... but I would like a area of the menu that will show my most used programs and documents, it would save me a lot of time.
One of the problems with Mint if you use wifi is you have to reenter your settings every time you boot the computer. Here are instructions for a work around.
Another issue with Mint is root login, there is a huge controversy about the security issues caused by logging in as root, but I have ran into several issues where sudo did not work. In case you do not know, sudo allows you to run a program as root. In order to do this open a terminal and type sudo and the command that you would like to run as root. Once you press enter you will be asked for the root password.
To allow root login you will have to use the sudo command. Open Konsole and type the following:
sudo kate /etc/kde3/kdmrc
Then press enter. You will get some error messaged in Konsole, ignore them. You will have to enter your password. The Kate text editor will open and allow you to edit kdmrc.
Change the line that says "AllowRootLogin = False" to "AllowRootLogin = True" and click the save icon. You will be able to log out and login as root.
One of the first things a Linux addict loves to do once the new system is installed is to see what free software is available. Mint uses Adept as a package manager, it has a very slick interface but I like Synaptic so that was the first thing I installed. There is all of the usual software and if that is not enough there is a comprehensive list of repositories here, as the post states do not get greedy, there is no guarantee that all of the repositories will play nice together.
3D desktop eye candy is available through Beryl. I have two laptops, one has an old unsupported S3 Twister video card so Beryl isn't much good. My Sony laptop has some 3D capabilities and Beryl is very cool. I have found a bug where it will not display the task bar so I haven't used it much.
The stock icons, fonts, wallpaper and everything else that I usually tweak are pretty darn good. The only thing that I have changed visually is I have made the task bar translucent and I have added my vacation photo's to the desktop wallpaper.
My favorite thing about Mint is it just works. I haven't had any lockups or other strange things happen since I have installed it. I can play MP3s with Amarok, I can play YouTube videos, I haven't run into a situation yet where I could not play a video or open a file because that codex was not already installed.
Any complaints? Only a few, the wireless configuration interface located in the task bar could be better. I own a Nokia 770 and wireless interface is great. It will list the available hot spots that are within range and allow you to connect to them with a single click. As long as you connect to the same wifi hot spot Mint will connect when you boot up, but if you are traveling you will need to start KwifiManager or other configuration tools to connect to the hot spot.
Ubuntu should learn a lesson from Mint, they should buy Mint and incorporate the Mint tweaks into Ubuntu.
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