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.

Linux: Codecs, Proprietary Drivers & Hassle

I'm currently playing around with linux distros trying to find one that suites me. I've a collection of coverdisks from linux mags, and I'm to-ing and fro-ing, installing the various flavours on my new computer. But I'm finding it *very* frustrating.

Vista

First of all, the box came with Vista pre-installed. And whatever else can be said about micros~1 - Vista looks great! But I like my command line, so I reduced the Vista partition; created a few new ones and installed Ubuntu 7.04.

Ubuntu vs Media

My first impressions was that Ubuntu looks fairly ugly - or maybe 'old' is a better word - compared to Vista. Ubuntu catches up with the 3D desktop effects, and after installing NVIDIA's proprietary drivers from the "Restricted Drivers" tool, everything was running smoothly.

That was until I tried to play MP3's and the video tutorials from the guitar mag coverdisks I've lying around. Unsucessfully - although in fairness Vista doesn't play MPEG4's or MOVs out of the box either. I've no internet connection at home, so I can't use the automatic download tools to fetch the codecs. Hunting around on the net gave me no clues on what packages to download - and even if I fire up Synaptic and ask it to write a download script I've still no idea what to ask it to download.

LinuxMint vs Drivers

Then I heard of LinuxMint with it's bundled codecs. So I ordered it from On-Disk and was pleased to see it arrive after only 4 days or so. I much prefer the colour scheme, but again, things like the (IMHO) very poor icons make it look a bit rusty. The mintMenu is fairly cool and friendlier that Ubuntu's two-panel approach. But LinuxMint doesn't come with the *&^%£€<¹!¡ NVIDIA drivers!!


I'm going to have to stop being such a tight-arse and get my home computer wired up to the web. Or wait until NVIDIA open-source their drivers...