Big Fat Ostrich

So I finally installed the ever popular Linux Mint 12 aka Lisa. The last time I tried Linux Mint was version 3.0 (Cassandra), which was back in 2007 (eons ago in Internet time). Back then, Linux Mint was a little shaky and one horribly broken  upgrade had me reverting back to Ubuntu.

Well, alot has changed since then and Linux Mint 12 appears very solid!

Instead of wiping my recent installation of Ubuntu 11.10 (even though I kind of want to), I installed Linux Mint as a virtual machine in VirtualBox. There’s not much to say about it except that the installation was hassle free. Typical installation, where you hit next a bunch of times. You can choose the advanced options of course, but we’re really trying out Mint for its simplicity.

Linux Mint is a Debian based distro, so like Ubuntu, apt-get is your package manager, and best friend. After using Arch Linux on my other machine for awhile, I have to say that apt-get is still the best. Pacman is fine, just a little too manual.

New features in Linux Mint 12 include Gnome 3 and MGSE aka Mint Shell Gnome Extensions which gives the desktop a super slick look. We used to make fun of Mint and call it Lounge Linux because of it’s pseudo-stylish look, but it really does look good. And the whole feel is just fast and snappy. There’s also MATE, which is a fork of Gnome 2. However, the dudes at Linux Mint central say that it’s not 100% stable yet so I’m not going to get into that now.

Overall the whole thing feels fast, and I’m running it on a mere 512M of RAM. I should say that I initially tried to install Mint using a bare minimum of 256M and that caused the installation to crash. I know. What was I thinking?

There are also tons of visual improvements, slick wallpapers, and MGSE doesn’t have the convoluted look of Unity. Unity feels like it’s there to confuse you. MGSE and Mint just feel better. Like you can just start using the OS without having to play scavenger hunt for all your apps. And it’s all running on the new 3.0 kernel.

Last new thing: I was surprised to see that Linux Mint is using Duck Duck Go as its default search engine. Yep. Where every other OS just assumes that you’re going to want to use Google, in Mint it’s Duck Duck Go. But don’t worry: you can use Google too if you want.

Aside from the weird name, Duck Duck Go is a really great search engine. I think many of us have gotten to a point where we use Google out of habit. Back in the old prospector days of the internet, we used to use multiple search engine all the time because no single search engine had all the results we wanted. Then Google changed all that by becoming so great. However, Duck Duck Go is very good and much cleaner than Google at this point. One of its best features is that its results act like a dynamic feed, so all you have to do is keep scrolling down the page for more results, kind of like Twitter does. With Google, you still have to click next page, next page, next page, etc. Which is so 3 years ago.

Duck Duck Go also has a strict privacy policy where they state that they do not collect any personal information.

All that to say, give Duck Duck Go a try. I’m challenging myself to use it for a week even if I’m having trouble getting used to looking at that bow tie wearing duck. And the name. Again: What is with people using animals in names for software and websites? Yeah, I’m looking at you, IPchicken.

One last thing! If you want a clue about how amazing Linux Mint 12 is, do a Google search for something like Linux Mint 12 Issues or Problems with Linux Mint 12. The results of my searches were mainly Linux Mint reviews, and for the most part, positive ones. The issues that people have been having have been minor so far, which is a good sign.

Ok, I need to go so let’s end this thing: Linux Mint 12 looks and feels great. Try it and adopt it.

It’s done.

I wrote about how I was going to remove Ubuntu 11.10 and install Arch Linux instead and I did it.

The experience was nowhere near as painful as installing Gentoo, and as I suspected, it would be a little bit closer to an older Debian installation. You really do have complete control over what to install. Yes, you have to specify that you want xorg, or else you’ll end up with a headless install.

The first time logging in was clumsy as hell.

I get the desire to have a minimal installation. Really, I get it. Logging in for the first time and seeing 3.9 Gigs of RAM free out of 4Gigs was a thing of beauty. But do I really have to install ‘ifconfig’ separately? It’s really not included in the base install?

Choosing which packages to install is fine, but having to install sshd and ifconfig separately? Now you’re just wasting my time. Seriously, I’m getting angry again just thinking about it!

And what about the stuff I DID choose? Like Libre Office, Rhythmbox and VirtualBox? Even though I specified those, they were never installed. No biggie, since I just installed them myself afterwards.

But what about important stuff, like fonts? Don’t get me started on the fonts or the complete absence of them. Yep. Have to install those too.

So, to figure out which fonts you need, you can do the following:

pacman -Ss font

Install those net-tools as well. You’ll need them:

pacman -S net-tools

Do you need ssh? Of course you do!

pacman -S sshd

And so on.

Getting my xorg nice and slick and spanning across two monitors using the proprietary Nvidia drivers took some work. I installed the drivers like this:

pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils

Anyway, I’m not going to go into a huge how-to for Arch Linux here. It’s way too involved for that. Plus, they have a wealth of documentation which you can find on the Arch Linux Wiki. It’s long and involved, but all of the answers are there.

With all that said, if you don’t like documentation or reading/learning something new, Arch Linux is probably not for you. It’s definitely not for the impatient. I will say that now that I’ve got everything working, my system is faster than it’s ever been. I don’t have the fonts just right yet so it kind of looks like it’s been up all night drinking vermouth, but it sure runs fast. Everything is super snappy like and good.

I’ll be back with one more post about this, after a week of regular use. If things don’t work out with Arch-Linux, I’ll either be going back to an apt-get based system or Red Hat Fedora.

Yeah, I did it. I finally did it! I bought a laptop. A Dell Inspiron Core i3 64 bit 15 inch thing to be exact. It came preloaded with Windows 7 and the usual Dell crap and McAfee, which has a generous 10 day free trial. Wow guys. That was awesomely generous indeed!

So after about a week of tweaking this thing, checking out that thing, and generally yawning over the whole Windows 7 experience, I took the next plunge: INSTALL UBUNTU 10.04 LTS!

It worked out stellarly.

I’m glad I waited the week. I was going to install Karmic on it, but then I read that Karmic doesn’t support i3 processors. Lucid Lynx does, and the install was smooooth. In fact, this release is all about change. No longer can we refer to Ubuntu as “Brownbuntu”. That’s right. They’ve removed that hideous brown theme and went with a purpley splash screen. It’s a little sleeker than the last release, and maybe even edging a little closer to Mac OS in style. Still, it feels like Linux and performs great.

Everything works. Video, audio, and the integrated wireless card. It’s kind of ridiculous for me to call it an integrated wireless card in this day and age, isn’t it? It’s a laptop! Everything is integrated!

So, after the install, I installed VirtualBox OSE and installed Windows 7 as a VM. That’s where Windows 7 will live. Forever. And with the VM running, you can really feel that you’re getting your value out of those 4 gigs of RAM. You don’t even feel it, even with Compiz running which is on by default. I may tweak Lynx to use less memory, but for now I’m enjoying the fact that there is no lag whatsoever, no matter what I do!

Now. About the D-Link 615 piece of crap router that I bought from  Dell with my order. I’m about to break the thing in half and go back to my wired router. Wireless is fine. Wired is fine. Browsing anywhere on the ‘ternets? Fine! How about ssh from my laptop back to my wired server? It doesn’t fucking work. I can reach my wired network from my wired machine. But the router seems to be blocking ssh and port 443 just from the wireless network. I’m 100% sure that this has nothing to do with my Dell Inspiron I3.

And yeah, I forwarded ports 443 and 22. Don’t think I didn’t, cause I did.

I’ll let you know how it all works out!