#mint 12

[leyoutiao]

A Good Ol' Time with Linux

is about to come to an end.

I said, maybe a month after I started digging in to the different distributions, that I'd tested enough OSs and would set a couple up for work and be done with it.

What I meant by that is I would test a plethora more and delve into infamous timesinks Arch and Slackware. It's been rewarding, but after trying just about every desktop Linux distribution out there (not really, haha. holy shit, that'd be a lot), and after a lot of sloppy writing, I'm going to rein this in a little bit -- mostly because I'm out of interesting candidates -- but not before I do quick reviews of the ones I have tried recently or have tried to try (lookin' at you, CentOS).

A quick primer for myself: Salix, Slackware, Archbang, Arch. Then CentOS spin Stella and CentOS (neither of which's live CDs would boot), Scientific Linux 6, followed by Fedora, Debian Wheezy/Sid, a short (less than 1 hour) run of Mageia 1, and, finally, Semplice.

Damn, I have a compulsive disorder. No. Really.

My favorites? Mint 12 has stayed strong throughout. Fuduntu, as well. Salix and Slackware are lovely distros.

Ubuntu 11.1 and Fedora 16 both fell short of being all-around "good" for me because of their shortcomings. Ubuntu was unresponsive on the little lappy and still slow on the monster big head lappy. Kind of unacceptable, considering the specs. Fedora, while fast, felt unpolished. Being spoiled by Mint's highly tweaked Gnome 3, Fedora's vanilla presentation of it, complete without right clicks and touchpad tap clicks, seemed unpolished.

--- Edit: Fedora was quite solid, despite feeling rough. If the support period were longer, we might see more really good derivatives, since it seems to run quite light, especially for such a full-featured system. As it is, Fuduntu's kind of the one. (I didn't enjoy Kororaa (but then again, Slackware and Porteus had about the only KDE environments I liked. Man, that logo, with the sharp looking gears, annoys me.)) As it stands, I think oppenSuSE, of the big distributions, has about the best release cycle for derivatives, being stable and powerful. But whatever bad mojo it has with Novell backing it probably keeps developers away. ---

Uncexpectedly good: Semplice. Most of the above was written in that environment. Semplice feels like Crunchbang done right. While I said previously that Archbang did Crunchbang better than Crunchbang, well Semplice is a take on the Crunchbang theme that comes together much more elegantly because the developers put a lot of thought into making things semplice. The menu updates automatically, the tint2 configurations -- if indeed that's what it uses -- are more unobtrusive, the kernel firmware is more up to date (read: didn't have to waste time installing Realtek crap), etc. I liked it a lot and will be keeping it around for rescue operations and just to tinker with Debian repositories.

Even more unexpectedly good: Ubuntu 12.04 Beta! This thing was a pain in the ass to install, but as I type in it now, it is a good experience. I actually like it more than Mint 12, though I'm sure Mint 13 will have something to say about that. A couple of things like the menu scroll sensitivity haven't been worked out, and booting stalled the first couple of times, but it is a good revamp of Ubuntu. I am probably going to use this instead of Mint LTS, provided my small lappy runs it.

Expectedly good: Scientific Linux. CentOS and Stella just would not boot for me. I downloaded different iterations of SL and CentOS and only the SL Live DVD booted for me, and then only on the large laptop. I get a kernel panic on the 1201t, which I think comes from unsupported hardware. (Someone on the CentOS forums had similar problems with the 1215b.) I'll chalk that up as a lost cause for now.

But SL booted! And the Gnome 2 desktop is great. Smooth and snappy. Click tap will have to be edited into the auto start, but it's hard the beat the combination of stability, power, and low system requirements.

High hopes -- dashed: Scrambled, really. I was waiting for Mageia 2, but figured I ought to try 1. It just doesn't seem very up to date. The Live CDs are only available in 32 bit and my wireless card wasn't picked up. The installer also had a somewhat cramped and difficult to decipher design. 2 has been getting rave reviews, though I doubt I'll give it more than a quick look when it's released, because Ubuntu Precise is just that good. Again, system requirements will make the difference.

Salix and Slackware, Salix and Slackware.... How do I say, despite their rather idiosyncratic design philosophies, I am impressed by the results. I think the reason I like them is similar to the reason I like Fuduntu. Small projects with lots of personality with the pieces held together in the mind of one subgenius (I'll allow myself that usage) benevolent dictator for life. In Fuduntu's case: Fewt and his oddball humor, and Patrick Volkerding. (If he's half as charismatic as his name.... (Why do I want to make a German joke here? Something about half as long as Das Kapital and only twice as funny....)

Nothing is as stable as Slackware. It's the only system I used that didn't glitch in some way. Most of these systems had outright bugs or performance hiccups. Mint has occasional graphical glitches, Fuduntu's default repos give me trouble, Debian's installer is overly rigid in demanding a CD, but Slackware just does its thing. Even Salix had kernel crashes from plugging in USB keys (before an update).

Slackware abides.

And for that, I'll keep using it.

[leyoutiao]

Hey, got my Linux setup

So, I'm typing away in Linux Mint "Lisa", the x86_64 version right now. It's good. Nice and customized for productivity (I edit, by the way).

I'm using Mint as the main OS, because of stability, ease of customization, and familiarity. The huge repositories don't hurt, either (Thanks Debian and Ubuntu).

I have Crunchbang on the second HD, along with Chakra and Fuduntu. I like Crunchbang for its snappy response time and the sparseness of it (have to get usb auto-mount working, though).

I fell in love with Chakra from first use. It's gorgeous and eminently functional (and powerful). Kubuntu was another KDE OS I liked, too, but Chakra is better integrated with KDE. It was a very nice change after testing Kororaa, but that had more to do with the Fedora base than anything else.

Fuduntu. I like their style. What can I say? From their website to the default background the icons they've preloaded in the AWN dock. It's also based on Fedora, but they apparently forked a while ago and have made it more user friendly, and put it on a rolling release schedule (++).

So, yeah. I'll be doing most of my stuff in Mint, but it's been a great journey finding different OSs. It was definitely not this easy (Multisystem!) when I tried this two years ago. Ease of access and polished desktops backed by consistent, large, dedicated teams will bring Linux desktops more into the mainstream. Products like LiLi, UNetbootin, and Multisystem help with that for sure (who doesn't have a USB drive these days?) Broadband internet! And rock-solid releases like OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Mint, Chakra, Fuduntu, CentOS which are easy to set up for productivity or play are going to appeal a lot to the mainstream Windows or OS X user.

[walkero]

Linux Mint 12 installation move

Yesterday I got a new hard disk for my trustful laptop. My HP laptop runs for more than three years, every day, for more than ten hours. As you can see it's a fully working computer. If you ask why I had to change the hard disk, the reasons are safety and speed. Safety, because you never know what might happen after all that time of daily work. Speed, because the new hard disk (Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid SSD 500GB) is almost twice as fast as the previous one (Toshiba MK3252GSX 320GB). I connected the new hard disk using SATA to USB converter.

The old hard disk has installed Linux Mint 12 which I like very much, including all the software I use. This has to be moved to the new hard disk and here it is how I managed to do it.

First of all I used GParted live cd, which helped me to copy the partitions from the Toshiba HD to the new Seagate. Although that the hard disks are not exactly the same in size, GParted can copy partitions and data, while you can change the partition size too. So, I kept my "boot", "root" and "swap" partitions exactly the same, but I increased the "home" partition to have all the spare space.

To copy the partitions using GParted is very easy. First of all you have to attach all the hard disks at the computer and boot with the GParted Live CD. When it starts up, it shows the window of GParted, viewing the first of the hard disks and it's partitions. From the select box at the top right corner you can change the currently using hard disk.

Choose the new hard disk and install "Partition Table" in it, from the menu. After that you can copy the partitions from the old hard disk to the new. The way to do that, is to activate the old hard disk, right click on the first partition and select "Copy" from the popup menu. Go now to the new hard disk, right click on the grey partition bar and select "Paste" on it. A window will come up where you can set up the size of the new partition. Do the same for all the partitions, one by one. When you copy all the partitions click "Apply" to perform this jobs. Lay back now, because it will take some time. For me the 320GB hard disk copied in around 200 minutes. Last thing to do is to activate the boot flag at the "boot" partition.

If you try to boot with the new hard disk you will see only a cursor at the top left corner blinking, which means that the Grub is not installed correctly. What you have to do is to install Grub and update it's configuration, and here is how you can do it.

Use your live CD of the linux Mint 12 to boot. Keep your new hard disk attached. Open a terminal and do the following.

Get root access $ sudo su

Install the Grub v2 at the system # apt-get install grub2

Find the hard disk and partitions you have on your computer # fdisk -l

Mount the "root" partition of your new hard disk # mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt

Install the Grub at the new hard disk # grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/sdb

Mount necessary folders of the new "root" hard disk. If you don't do that, the following commands will show errors # mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev # mount -o bind /proc /mnt/proc # mount -o bind /sys /mnt/sys

# chroot /mnt bash

# sudo update-grub

After the above reboot your system with the new hard disk and this will boot just fine. At least it did for me.