Almost Fresh Linux Mint

After three years of "community" Mandrake Linux, my work PC has run out of steam. Lots of rubbish and out of date: time for a spring clean and a new operating system!

So I decided to do things the easy way: go down to the newsagent and pick a nice looking distribution from a magazine DVD and install that. So off I went, and returned with Linux Mint. Reading up on it sounded good: Ubuntu. multimedia, some nice extras.

The bottom line: Linux Mint is a really nice distribution for vanilla home systems, and good for office PCs. I haven't got everything working yet, and but the package management and file service systems are really good. The desktop has a couple of problems in the version I am using, but overall it feel small, neat, unbloated. It is certainly the most un-UNIXy UNIX I have used; several times I found that I was much more successful in fixing a problem by thinking "What would I do in Windows or on a Mac?" that "What do I do in the shell?"

Taking the DVD out, I was a little disappointed: it turns out that the version was Bianca Linux Mint Light, which is several months old and fairly stripped down. But at least it takes me from 2004 software to 2007! So not to worry.

The first hurdle in installing was that my DVD player was, in fact, bust. Lose an hour for that. Then I found that it wouldn't boot from the disk unless in safe graphics mode. Lose an hour for that. Then it still wouldn't boot, until I took out the second graphics card. Lose an hour for that.

Finally, it installs and boots OK. Setup is OK, and the partition manager is really great, even if it fails to resize properly the first time through. At last I manage to break free of my 1980's system administration expertise and just have one big fat partition.

User account: My first freakout: it doesn't ask for a root password, but uses the control list style Adminstrator permissions system: in fact, I cannot even find anywhere what the password for "su" is. But ">sudo sh" is just as good.

Next stop is the networking: it boots up using DHCP but I have static IPs. It configures OK, but there is a little icon on the desktop telling me there is no networking: it lies and confuses me. Lose half an hour. Rebooting doesn't make the little icon work properly: I guess it just likes DHCP.

Next for disk mounting. First I have to change the UID and GID so that my system matches the servers. Nice utility to do that. But it isn't smart enough to change the permissions on my home directory. So when I reboot, it fails and hangs. Oh dear. Reboot again, and cancel out into a shell, then use good old chown -R. Reboot and it all works fine.

What is nice, though, is that the old NTFS disk just comes up. And I have a little difficulty with figuring out how to mount remote disks. Under a control called "Shared Folders" it tells me I should download Samba and NFS support, I do that, and still a mystery. "Think Windows or Mac!" I say to myself, and sure enough in the File Browser I can look at the PC network and select directories to mount. The mount command on the menu is "Connect to this server". The names of menu items are so un-UNIXy is it quite discombobsyouruncle.Rebooting, and the remote file mounts come up again properly: great.

Not so much luck with printers. The various forms provided don't match the kinds of information from the config files I saved from the old Linux system. I'll leave it to later.

I'm switching to Evolution for email for now. It configured very easily, no difference from Thunderbird really. Clicking on a PDF that the old Mandrake gv viewer barfed on earlier today, and it comes up in something called "Document Manager" and displays well. Good.

The download manager is very nice indeed. Much nicer than Mandrake. I install some updates fine, and Sun's Java, but the shells don't get the Java path added, however it looks like it has configured Web Start properly. Mint is just not oriented to shell users! Something to get used to.

Open Office comes up looking much nicer than it did on Mandrake. I guess that is GNOME rather than KDE.

The only downside of the Desktop GUI so far is that the buttons on the menu bar don't bring the application forward. Very odd; must be a bug?

So still to get working: dual monitor, printing, and fixing that irritating wrong networking icon: not bad at all despite the poor start earlier. I am happy enough with Linux Mint that I might just move up to the newer Cassandra version immediately: it is certainly good enough that I have no inclination to try out another distro. (If I find anything to change my mind, I'll put it as a comment below.)