TITLE SHOULDA BEEN: Comparing Mint 12 with Oneiric 11.10 when trying to completely dump Unity.

[Jim March]

Well another issue is, early reports on Ubuntu 12.04 "Precise" have
been awesome.  I'm going to wait until either a late alpha or early
beta and upgrade but even at "alpha 2" people are calling it very
stable by any standards, let alone "early alpha".

This of course means Mint 13 ought to rock too, but...honestly, I've
proven to my own satisfaction that with some tweaking, I can turn
Ubuntu Oneiric into a user interface just as good as Mint 12 and
likely I'll be able to do the same with Precise.

Mint's lack of support for whole disk encryption alone is, to me, a
deal-breaker.

Jim

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 4:26 PM, Stu <wien33 at cox.net> wrote:
> On 02/10/2012 04:10 PM, Jim March wrote:
>>
>> Sigh.
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 4:06 PM, Jim March<1.jim.march at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> OK. So I hate Unity with a passion. Sorry. I'm not going to argue
>>> about it, it just isn't my thing.
>>>
>>> I can deal with Gnome3 set to classic mode - while the menus are a bit
>>> annoying plus there's that whole "hold ALT to modify the toolbar
>>> stuff", there's some quite decent stability enhancements that make the
>>> nuisance parts worth it.
>>>
>>> The question then is, do you want to go with Linux Mint 12 (which is
>>> basically Ubuntu Oneiric tweaked to no-Unity plus restricted
>>> codecs/players) or do you run "real Ubuntu Oneiric" and hand-tweak
>>> Unity out yourself?
>>>
>>> Well the answer to me has come down to "tweak Oneiric".
>>>
>>> 1) Mint 12 just "felt unstable". Hybernate-to-disk didn't work (across
>>> two machines) and other small glitches popped up here and there.
>>> Nothing show-stopper but still, very obviously some unpolished bits.
>>>
>>> 2) The first time I installed Mint 12 (32bit) I got
>>> whole-disk-encryption working via the scripts at:
>>>
>>> http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/344
>>>
>>> For reasons I don't understand at all, it stopped working. I tried it
>>> in 32bit, failed, tried again in 64bit when I recently scored a more
>>> potent machine (more memory for starters) and yet again, failure. This
>>> forced me into the "encrypted home folder" plan which is quite
>>> possibly where some of the glitches occurred - possibly including the
>>> hibernation fail.
>>>
>>> A few days ago I backed up and reinstalled clean from an Oneiric 64bit
>>> alternate install disk. I did the "anti-Unity" tweaks at:
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.webupd8.org/2011/10/things-to-tweak-after-installing-ubuntu.html
>>>
>>> ...to get "classic Gnome" running right, and they worked like a champ.
>>> The only thing that went wrong was, on one of the reboots LightDM
>>> failed completely and dumped me to a command prompt. But doing:
>>>
>>> sudo apt-get install gdm
>>>
>>> ...and picking the GDM startup manager fixed that. (The instructions
>>> warn of problems with LightDM and sure enough, he's not kidding! I
>>> ignored that and it bit me in the butt.)
>>>
>>> I now have fastest, most stable full-on setup I've ever run. It starts
>>> up without Compiz but doing an ALT-F2 and "compiz --replace" gives me
>>> the eye candy when I want it. Cool.
>>>
>>> Starting with real Ubuntu you need to do the usual tweaks (medibuntu,
>>> load w32codecs or w64codecs, libdvdcss, flash player, extra gstreamer
>>> stuff, etc. but that's not a big deal.
>>>
>>> Random thoughts:
>>>
>>> For my needs, the breakover point at which 64bit is a good idea is
>>> 3gigs RAM. I need to run WinXP virtualized (VirtualBox for now but
>>> since my latest lappy has hardware virt support in the CPU I'll switch
>>> soon). 64bit code is bulkier so with 2gigs RAM and 768megs assigned to
>>> the XP machine, RAM gets tight. With 32bit code, memory usage in more
>>> efficient. At 3gigs of real RAM I can run 64bit and assign 1gig to the
>>> XP VM with no problems.
>>>
>>> 64bit still has "glitches". For example, to get Adobe Flash going you
>>> end up adding some 32bit libraries. Which is fine until you load
>>> Google Chrome, at which point it wants the 64bit version of said
>>> libraries. Ooops. This is solvable: the solution is to install the
>>> google .deb file at the command line:
>>>
>>> sudo dpkg -i googlesupplieddebname.deb (after CDing into the dir with
>>> the .deb file)
>>>
>>> ...and watch for what it fails on. Load synaptic if you haven't already:
>>>
>>> sudo apt-get install synaptic
>>>
>>> ...and use that to specifically load the 64bit versions of the
>>> libraries it's choking on. (Leave the 32bit versions in there so flash
>>> still works.)
>>>
>>> That said, the "64bit glitchies" are extremely minor and no trouble
>>> for anybody slightly Linux-experienced to cope with. For total Linux
>>> newbies OR those with 2gigs or less RAM I'm still recommending 32bit
>>> and I suspect Precise won't change that.
>>>
>>> Jim
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Tucson Free Unix Group - tfug at tfug.org
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>>> http://www.tfug.org/mailman/listinfo/tfug_tfug.org
>>
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> I have to agree. I've been a Mint fan since ver.7, and 12 is something of a
> letdown. I'm sticking with Mint 11 on my main machine, and trying something
> new on my others.
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