LinuxMint

Distros and Me

As mentioned in my last post, I had a rotten time trying to find a linux distro that suited me straight out of the box. I suppose this is a big ask, but the reasoning behind it is that I know I'm going to want to try out tons of distros, but I don't want to have to go thru the hassle of configuring it to suite each time. I suppose I'm going to have to settle on one distro for "everyday use" and leave the other ext3 partition on my harddrive for my new distro fixes. I've settled on LinuxMint (MintLinux??) 'cos I like the codec support and the themes and I like the fact that it can use the Ubuntu repos.

NVIDIA Drivers

I hate freedom, and I want my NVIDIA drivers. My Linux box remains unconnected to the net, which makes it a pain to install the NVIDIA drivers on LinuxMint. Luckily, I stumbled across an easy fix for installing NVIDIA drivers. It requires a Ubuntu Fiesty CD (which matches LinuxMint Cassandra), which I got with a linux magazine...

* Fire up Synaptic and disable all the repositories pointing to the web.
* Select 'Add a CDROM' and insert the Ubuntu CD when prompted.
* Close Synaptic.
* Open Restricted Driver Manager.
* Enable NVIDIA Drivers, which now it grabs from the CD drive.
* (Reboot? - I can't remember exactly)

OpenOffice

I've spotted a few funnies with the locale settings when using OpenOffice. I selected Dublin, Ireland as my timezone (locale?) when installing LinuxMint. I'm also assuming that the language packs that are installed depend on the locale in some logical way. But unfortunately I had to manually install the help files and the dictionaries for OpenOffice. It looks like the installer was looking for 'English (Ireland)' for example and could not find it, but it did not revert to 'English (UK)' or 'English (US)' and instead installed nothing. I suppose what I'm getting at is that it'd be nice if there was some kind of graceful fallback for OpenOffice Help and Dictionary files.