Linux Mint 8 is Awesome

I

Ion Silverbolt

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 17, 2004
Messages
339
I just installed Linux Mint 8. I must say, it is quite impressive to me. Everything works right out of the gate including wireless. Movie codecs are automatically installed, and it has the huge DB of apps since it uses Ubuntu repositories.

If you like Ubuntu, then you'll like Mint even more. It seems so much more polished than Ubuntu IMO. I been using Gentoo mainly for years because I have never cared for the standard binary distros. Mint impressed me enough to stick with it though.

http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php
 
i was waiting and waiting for linux mint 8... then it came out... thought about waiting for the 64 bit version...

then i couldn't wait any longer so i went ahead and installed the 32 bit version. while installing onto my hdd, their pop-up menus says i never need a anti-virus, registry cleaner nor defrag ever. i agree with the the last two, but anti-virus? is that really true???

what's impressive is that they customized pretty much all applications in their .mint packages to match their theme, sheesh - that's so much work!

then day after i installed, they came out with their 64 bit RC 1! OMG! i'm gonna have to re-install everything later... i re-encode media, so i want the slight bump in performance.

can anyone recommend me a really good effective firewall for this distro??? (linux noob who's dual booting)

super fast boot and shut-down times - wow!

+elegance, no doubt about it.
 
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There is already a firewall config utility in Mint. Check the system tab.

System/Administration/Firewall Settings
 
I've loved Linux Mint for quite a while. It's just like it says, a polished version of Ubuntu. I recommend it to more people than Ubuntu. And I use it myself.

And there are a lot of people that claim that Ubuntu and others are for Linux newbies... But, I thought that the CLI and kernel were all the same? Just because I'm running a custom theme and packages doesn't make it less of a distro. I can do 99.9% of what everyone else can. I never understood the elitism that came with that. But, I do have experience with Red Hat ... 3, I think. Maybe 2... It's been a long time since I played with that, though. 12 years or so, I think.

But, Linux Mint is just awesome! Oh, and I'm downloading 8 to put on a VM and I'm going to run apt upgrade, too! :)
 
amd_ftw said:
i was waiting and waiting for linux mint 8... then it came out... thought about waiting for the 64 bit version...

then i couldn't wait any longer so i went ahead and installed the 32 bit version. while installing onto my hdd, their pop-up menus says i never need a anti-virus, registry cleaner nor defrag ever. i agree with the the last two, but anti-virus? is that really true???

what's impressive is that they customized pretty much all applications in their .mint packages to match their theme, sheesh - that's so much work!

then day after i installed, they came out with their 64 bit RC 1! OMG! i'm gonna have to re-install everything later... i re-encode media, so i want the slight bump in performance.

can anyone recommend me a really good effective firewall for this distro??? (linux noob who's dual booting)

super fast boot and shut-down times - wow!

+elegance, no doubt about it.
Click to expand...

What are you on? I want some!
 
criccio said:
What are you on? I want some!
Click to expand...

haha, I was thinking the same thing.

I'm running Mint 8 right now as well. I like the Fedora feel to it at login and with some other things. It's nice. Doesn't seem as bloated as Mint 7, but still a bit too heavy. I just wanted something on my laptop that works and I don't have to touch, and for that, Mint 8 is perfect.
 
After testing it successfully on my desktop, I installed it on my HPmini110 netbook. Everything works perfectly. And web pages scroll a lot smoother! It's either XP not supporting the Atom's hyperthreading right, or the Intel graphics driver for XP sucks. Not sure which,

The only thing lacking is support for the broadcom crystal HD card. The Atom is more than fast enough to play most media files though. For real HD stuff, I use Arcsoft in XP. Hopefully Linux support will come out eventually.
 
I use Mint too and have for quite some time now. It's the only distro I have ever used that didn't bomb out when I changed video cards from Nvidia to ATI but it did when I went back to Nvidia a few days ago on that PC. All I got was a black screen until I removed ATI drivers with apt and then installed Nvidia driver with apt from command line. When I went from Nvidia to ATI it recognized the change and asked me if I wanted to download and install the ATI driver.
 
i put mint on my girlfriend's eee pc, does everything it needs to do without being ubuntu brown.

love it.
 
Yeah ubuntu needs to ditch the turd colors for sure. :)

My favorite distros are Gentoo and Arch for the speed and customizing, but Linux Mint is hands down great for ease of use. Everything just works. No hassle.
 
I downloaded this the other day and played around with the live cd. After hearing you guys rave about it, I am not gonna be lazy anymore and actually shrink a partition to install this. I really want to see how it runs. Does Mint have the same problem I had with ubuntu where it doesn't display through dvi but does through vga?
 
I'm running ubuntu karmic (64 bit) on my home pc and would like to switch to mint for the eye candy. is there an easy way to do this? I realize the 64 bit may not be out quite yet, but once it is, what would i do to convert ubuntu to mint? I figure it should be fairly simplistic since it's all the same packages.
 
i started using linux with my pentium M based lappy. only gripe i have is, everytime i watch youtube or any flash based video, my cpu goes to 100%.. i have firefox and opera it does the same on both. anybody else have this issue?
 
cganesh75 said:
i started using linux with my pentium M based lappy. only gripe i have is, everytime i watch youtube or any flash based video, my cpu goes to 100%.. i have firefox and opera it does the same on both. anybody else have this issue?
Click to expand...

Yes. Flash on Linux is not well supported by Adobe. At least they're distributing a binary that's relatively recent now... it wasn't long ago that Flash 6 or something was the latest version available.

You can try disabling Visual Effects or whatever Mint calls it, there's apparently a bug in one of the Flash versions that conflicts with this. You're probably pretty hooped though, most folks say that it runs faster in a Windows VM than it does native. Pretty pathetic.
 
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Just installed it and like it. I am coming from a Gentoo background while nice I just get tired of researching. I would love just the XFCE version but I have installed XFCE and work on removing Gnome and some of the extra apps. It runs real quick and everything just works.
 
Tested Linux Mint 8 32bit, loved it. 64bit with flash worries me, I wanted to smash Linux Mint 7 64bit because flash always broke down. Don't get me wrong, I still fancied LM7, but I want to bi*** slap adobe for lack of any real support for flash. So this time I opted for the 32bit flavor and I must say, it's quite sexy.
 
Just popped it on an old IBM Thinkpad X40
Pentium M 1.6 with 512 megs.
Video fine, picked up the wireless fine...sometimes it seems to be a bit stubborn picking up an IP from my wireless...a wrt150n running access point mode with DD-WRT, WPA.
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
Just popped it on an old IBM Thinkpad X40
Pentium M 1.6 with 512 megs.
Click to expand...

How well does it run with only 512 megs of RAM? You might notice a bit more zip switching to xfce.


KevinO said:
Just installed it and like it. I am coming from a Gentoo background while nice I just get tired of researching. I would love just the XFCE version but I have installed XFCE and work on removing Gnome and some of the extra apps. It runs real quick and everything just works.
Click to expand...

I did the opposite. I removed Mint and installed Gentoo on my netbook. It's surely faster than Mint and I got it running sweet, but I have had a lot of free time to configure it.

I still find Mint very appealing. It's not slow by any means, and it's just so easy to install and use. I will always have a Mint disk handy as a backup.

Oh and btw, the Mint xfce version should be out within a week or two for those looking for a lighter version of Mint. (32-bit only)
 
That's odd. Does it boot ok when using a failsafe kernel? Might be an X issue with the default resolution. Try failsafe and update the drivers if possible. You might also try logging in from the command-line and running X manually.
 
I tried it. Looked great. Ended up just going back to Ubuntu 9.10 Desktop for my 1000he netbook though. Ive grown familiar with it and just got to the point where I like it as it is.

They made the graphics and ui look quite nice. Other than the menu changes which I didn't like, it pretty much felt identical to regular ubuntu =)
 
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By the screenshots, Mint 8 looks beautiful. This I will have to give a try...perhaps it may be the very distribution that gets me to switch to Linux from Windows.
 
Yeah there's some nice artwork in Linux Mint. Simple, yet beautiful.

Still waiting for LM8 xfce edition. Supposed to be out soon.
 
Have you guys tried crunchbang yet? It's also a derivative of Ubuntu, but is much better(imo). The hotkeys are great and the setup as a whole is supposed to be a bit lighter than Ubuntu. Anyway, I preferred it to Linux mint(which I used for all of 30mins maybe, so I'm not an expert on it) so give it a shot. They also have an eeepc version.
 
What's the difference between these distros and Ubuntu? Are you guys just wanting to use something aside from gnome or are there actually differences in the package management?
 
package management is the same afaik. I'm not a huge fan of gnome or kde. It seems to me that you can get the same functionality out of much less demanding desktop environments & windows managers than you can with the mainstream Ubuntu/Fedora stuff. So that's mostly why I like things like Crunchbang. I don't really care about looks. I just want things to open quickly and never slow down.
 
Oh well then screw Mint in that case ;)

I've already gone through a decade of eeking every drop of performance from my platforms via Gentoo. Nowdays I've got plenty power to worry about something light and I'm enjoying my OSX clone too much to muck around.
 
Now that I have remembered much of my old linux knowledge I am going to reinstall linux on both my netbook and desktop. I am definitely going to go with Mint 8 X64 on my desktop; I tried Kubuntu but man KDE is just too much. Gnome/gtk looks great while remaining simple, kde is just waaaay to bloated. It looks gorgeous but they need to trim it down. Or not, I mean if I like gnome, others like KDE, we both can use what we like heh.

So yeah, mint is going on the desktop, and Im going to try Xubuntu on the netbook. I love XFCE too, used to use it with gentoo; Im guessing it may run a little smoother on the atom n280 compared to the full ubuntu gnome install. I would like to keep compiz with full effects enabled.

Im curious if anyone knows, is XFCE slimmer than gnome just in mem usage, or in cpu cycles/bground services too? I have 2gb in my 1000he netbook and never fill it up on linux, even with full gnome running + a bunch of apps heh.
 
XFCE is considerably lighter than a full Gnome desktop in pretty much every way. It feels a *lot* faster on CPU-starved machines.
 
Ion Silverbolt said:
How well does it run with only 512 megs of RAM? You might notice a bit more zip switching to xfce.
Click to expand...

Seemed fine. Granted that x40 wasn't a powerhouse, also the sluggish 4,200rpm drive, so all things considered, I thought it ran well.

That x40 has been put to different use now though, it's running PFSense as my router at home.
 
All the compiz stuff runs just fine in xfce, or any window manager out there.

Really, I think xfce and gnome are very similar. It just seems to make more sense to me to go with xfce. Plus, thunar is a great file manager once you figure out the inner workings of it.
 
So, somewhat recently (this past Christmas season) I decided to try using Linux. I wanted to learn, through experience, more about computers and programming, so I thought why not try Linux. Certainly not learning a ton by just sticking with Windows. Having heard good things about Linux Mint 8, I decided to download it and give it a try. So far it has been nothing but amazing.

I initially had some boot problems, as I upgraded to windows 7 shortly thereafter, which overwrote my master boot record, but using my LiveCD I reinstalled grub 2 and everything has worked flawlessly. :) Outside of my little protective shell that is Windows, I am learning so much! I never knew there was so much more to computers. Even got to experimenting with a little C programming (key word there is "experimenting").

So yeah. Just thought I'd share my experience with you guys. Linux Mint 8 FTW!
 
I like Mint 8. It's faster than 7, but both are slower than XP (on a Celeron pc with 512mb). So I'm back to XP for now. I do like open office. The word auto-complete is very nice. Mint's overall env. is very appealing. I'll go back to it on a faster, newer machine.
 
Should I try the 64bit or 32bit version? Conflicts with the 64bit version?

Q6600
4Gb's of ram
ati 3850
 
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