Well, I have been messing with Linux Mint for a month now and thought I’d do a second review… Ok, I’ve kinda fallen in love with this OS.

I haven’t tried using it as a Server, but as far as being a good Desktop OS for a user, it seems to fit the bill quite nicely.  All the packages you need to make it truely usable seem to be available.  I don’t really like the built in package manager, MintInstall, but synaptic was available so all is well.

I did notice that it doesn’t install on some hardware that did work out of the box with Fedora 10.  I have a server and a laptop that it just won’t load the LiveCD on.  I’m not sure what the issue is there.  I’ll just use Fedora 10 on those.

The install does work quite well.  This computer already was dual boot between Fedora 10 and WindowXP (Yea, I do play Call of Duty 5 and America’s Army…) and it was able to shrink the Fedora 10 ext3 partition and create a new ext3 partition for Linux Mint… and all three boot without problem… Ok, I haven’t tried doing a kernel update on the Fedora 10 yet… and frankly I’m kinda scared to try…

Flash, DVD, etc. all worked out of the box which is a plus for folks coming over form Windows cause they are used to their new machine already being able to do that.

I will say I don’t care much for the “Start” menu though. It’s too compact rather than sprawling like the normal Gnome menu system.

I have not been a big fan of Ubuntu but this Ubuntu/Debian based OS is very nice. It doesn’t strictly follow the FOSS model, which is important to me.  I do think the compromises that have been made are appropriate and will continue to help remove the stigma that Linux is for “Geeks Only” which I view as the number one obstacle to achieving global acceptance of the OS as a whole.

Penguins, our day is coming!

Keep the faith!

Gecko

Ok, my last article I was going to make a wire/wireless router out of a Fedora 10 box. That didn’t work out too well.

I was able to make the wired network work great, and DHCP was easy. Where I failed was to get the Wireless NIC to accept incoming connections. I tried Ad Hoc and Infrastructure mode, but no good. I would love to hear some suggestions.

Thanks.