I saw a mention of Linux Mint on the cover of some Linux periodical recently — really I saw nothing more than the name and that it was based on Ubuntu. Sounds interesting, I thought, and promptly forgot about it.
Then I happened to see a link to some Linux Mint topic in del.icio.us earlier today, and the next thing I knew, I was downloading the torrent. After all, why not?
Some observations from before even installing Mint: The site states up-front that the “full version” of Linux Mint is intended for countries with no software patents, and that if you live in a country which recognizes software patents, you should download the “light” version. This is actually a really slick way to include all sorts of legally suspect modules, software and codecs in the default system — intuitively, it seems that this would be completely legal. They are stating up front that the full version, basically, potentially violates software patents… and then leave it up to you which version you install.
A nice side-effect of this is that it allows you to avoid needing to upgrade and install all manner of things right after install — at least, so I surmised.
As a side note — Mint 3.0 is based on Ubuntu 7.04, Feisty Fawn. For reasons I’ve not bothered to explore, the Feisty CD fails utterly to install on my old Dell Inspiron 5100… Mint 3.0, however, installs just fine. Not sure if there’s an obscure hardware conflict somewhere, but it is what it is — so on that count, at least, Mint is already looking pretty good.
Onwards… not having installed Feisty, I’m not sure if it has a migration wizard as part of the installation process — Mint, however, definitely does. So, say you have a little 8GB partition with Windows XP installed in it… Mint will look for a user account and ask you if you want to import files and settings from that account. Just for the heck of it, I said, Sure, why not let’s do that?. Jumping ahead just a little, when I finished the install and rebooted, all my files from the XP account had been copied over, including my desktop wallpaper, etc, etc… so, that’s a pretty cool feature, especially if their aim is to switch people from Window to Linux.
(Perhaps a reader can tell me if this is also a feature found in Feisty, of if this is unique to Mint…?)
Back to the install. I’m not sure if it was my hardware, low RAM, slow CD-ROM, or the overhead of the Live CD running, but the installation process took a long time. I’m guessing about an hour, I was reading Agile Development with Rails for most of that time, so it might have been slightly quicker… but not much. By “installation process”, I mean everything following walking through the setup wizard: the actual incremental journey of the ubiquitous progress bar from 0% to 100%.
Apart from that — on reboot, it was quite a treat.
No errors on boot. Sound worked automatically. Both Beryl and Compiz seem to be available out of the box… when I started Beryl it became clear that Mint had also automatically configured 3D acceleration — very nice. Beryl worked perfectly (can be started from Main Menu –> Configuration Tools –> Beryl Manager).
(To make Beryl auto-start with Gnome, you can open Preferences –> Sessions and add beryl-manager as an additional startup program.)
Getting WiFi to work was actually pretty simple — but it took quite awhile because I started trying to do it with ndiswrapper and the windows driver… well, it turns out that there is now a reverse engineered Linux driver for my Motorola pcmcia card, thus eliminating the need for ndiswrapper… very nice. See Ubuntu bcm43xx documentation for more information. (I did not end up using the wpa_supplicant portion of the docs, though I probably should have taken the time to get it working with that. Instead, I just put the iwconfig commands for my network into a short shell script and made that run on session start up as well….)
Admittedly, I’m writing after less than a day of use — but my take on Linux Mint so far would be overwhelmingly positive. Out of the box fantastic functionality, and desktop effects (via Beryl or Compiz) that rival or exceed those of Vista (and running on a machine that would never even be able to run Vista without at the very least some significant RAM upgrades).
