TriedIT - Software and Hardware News and Reviews

Apologies for the light posting lately. I have been busy working on some other projects, and I went out to visit family this weekend for the holiday. I hope everyone had a good Easter! And now the reviews must continue.

Linux Mint, a Linux distribution based in Ireland, is an Ubuntu-based distribution that aims to improve the out-of-box experience of Linux. Let’s see how this distribution stacks up.

Updated (April 11, 8:40AM EDT): Version number in title (and once in article) was incorrectly stated as “Beta 2″ instead of “Beta 020″ and has now been fixed.

What is Linux Mint?

The purpose of this Ubuntu-based distribution, according to its website, is “to produce an elegant, up to date and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution.” The group behind Linux Mint offers paid support to companies who want to use the distribution.

The Bianca KDE Edition I downloaded includes the following applications:

• KDE 3.5.6 and the kernel is 2.6.17-10
• Kmail/Kontact
• Koffice 1.6.2 replaces OpenOffice
• The default Web browser is Firefox 2.0.0.3
• Amarok version 1.4.5
• digikam
• the gimp
• inkscape
• scribus
• k3b
• k9copy
• and of course more…

There is support out of the box for numerous multimedia codecs, encrypted DVDs, as well as the latest Flash and Java plugins.

I downloaded and burned the DVD image, LinuxMint-2.2-KDE-BETA-020.iso, and booted it up on my desktop.

Booting the DVD

The boot screen came up and was pretty simple. It offered a graphics safe-mode, but I choose the default. The boot splash screen came up and I waited.

Linux Mint boot loader

Eventually X began to load and… nothing. It would appear that Linux Mint chose to use the “nv” driver for my Nvidia GeForce 7800GT, which causes my computer to die immediately every time. I rebooted and this time opted for the safe mode but that didn’t work on my system either. I tried a third time and selected some different video resolution settings (just as a test), and that resulted in the exact same thing happening. So I guess part of this beta is that it doesn’t actually let you use the video safe mode. This meant I couldn’t use it on my desktop PC at all. This is pretty sad, but the review must go on and VMware Fusion Beta on my MacBook Pro will serve as the next platform to test it on.

I set up the VM, and booted the installation DVD. This worked successfully and Linux Mint booted up. Unfortunately the KDE crash handler appeared on screen. I dismissed the dialog and a rather barren looking desktop appeared. If this related to the crash handler appearing, I’m not sure. Just as a test I rebooted a second time to see if I could reproduce the crash. In doing so I found out that I couldn’t easily reboot the system within KDE… the logout dialog wouldn’t appear. I forced a restart in the VM and tried it again to see what happened. Thankfully try number 2 worked out just fine and the full desktop loaded without problems. I really hate when things are flakey like that. But this is a BETA, after all. (Side note: I rebooted it several more times, and most of those times the same KDE crash problem occurred, so this will need to be something that is fixed.)

KDE Crash handler appeared several times on different login attempts

Trying it out

Linux Mint desktop and K menu

One of the first things you notice once the system is up is the ticker on the bottom of the screen displaying a Linux Mint RSS feed. This is the first distribution that I came across with that feature. The desktop wallpaper is quite green, but pretty pleasant. My colorblind friend might disagree, however. In any case the system feels quiet Ubuntu-ish as you would expect. It uses the Adept notifier which had a few packages with updates available. For package management you get to use Adept and KPackage, which is just an apt front-end.

Some applications running on Linux Mint

Everything seemed to work fine under my VMware session. All the applications were working fine as well that I could tell. I opened KPackage to check it out, but it caused the Linux Mint system (running from the live DVD under VMware) to completely freeze up. I tried it twice more to see if it was just a fluke, and all three times I tried running KPackage it resulted in a hard lock-up of the Linux Mint system. Oh well. I also noticed that Dolphin was in the menu twice, but this is a known bug according to the Linux Mint wiki.

Installation

Installation of Linux Mint. Check here for all the screen shots I took of this distro.

So I decided to install Linux Mint and see how that went under VMware on my MacBook Pro. The installer is very straight forward and simple and within a couple of minutes the system was installing to my VMware hard disk. It installed just fine without any incident. I then tried KPackage again, which worked just fine.

Except when I tried installing OpenOffice.org.

After this failure, KPackage began acting up and taking tons of CPU. I hit the close window button and nothing was happening for awhile then the kill window helper came up and I killed KPackage. Unfortunately it looks like KPackage has some issues both while running on the live DVD and after installation. I loaded up Adept (which is off the main menu for adding and removing programs, so you should probably use it instead of KPackage) and started installing OpenOffice.org 2.1.0. This worked fine, despite a pretty slow download. I don’t know why they have KPackage installed as well, since Adept is what actually works on this system. Unfortunately, OpenOffice.org didn’t appear on the K menu after the installation was complete.

Installing OpenOffice.org

I used Adept to install all the updates (29 upgrades, 5 new) and that worked fine as well except that after Adept had finished updating, I was notified that a new version of Kubuntu was available and asked if I wished to upgrade! Obviously Linux Mint’s roots are showing through.

I ran the “System Settings” utility which gives you a simple graphical configuration to such things as your network devices and user management. It had a distinctly similar feel to Mac OS X’s System Preferences utility.

System Settings under Linux Mint. Looks like OS X’s System Preferences to me.

Final Words

Despite a few rough edges, Linux Mint 2.2 Beta 020 “Bianca KDE Edition”, works well. The installer was flawless as well. The major problem I had with this distribution is the fact I couldn’t get it running on my desktop. Despite choosing the safe graphics mode it still ended in complete failure since it still loaded the Xorg “nv” driver. If they could fix this problem my opinion of the distribution would greatly improve. I’m sure it was just an oversight considering its beta status. Same with the problem of OpenOffice.org not appearing in the menu after being installed by Adept.

While it is always nice to have another Linux distribution, because choice is good, I didn’t see any compelling reason to use Linux Mint over the Ubuntu which it is based off of. The look is slightly different, with some different configuration options here and there. I can’t really say it offers anything special over Ubuntu, but you never know, there are no doubt future improvements that the Linux Mint team will make. Hopefully they fix the video driver issue so I can try it out on my desktop.