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

Tue Feb 14 19:44:29 MST 2012

Ah yes, the day(s) after...

So yeah, after a while I began noticing all kinds of issues, and issues 
began manifesting themselves.  Pretty darn annoying ones too, like the 
automount daemon doesn't work (I can't even figure out what they're 
supposed to be using today, the one I found sucks).  Unity taskbar items 
constantly crash, thunderbird crashes about every 15 minute (!), banshee 
crashes after the first song played, and newest ati drivers for precise 
are a basketcase as usual.

Caveat emptor on precise at the moment.

-mb

On 02/11/2012 01:08 AM, Michael Butash wrote:
> Well, I just threw caution to the wind and upgraded from 11.10 to 12.04,
> and aside from some new default annoyances and some leftover issues,
> Unity seems 100% improved for me. I always clench up a bit upgrading
> because I use about the oddest desktop config and hardware you can find,
> ssd, encryption, raid, multi monitor, other things developers forget
> about or take for granted. Unity now works across multi-monitor (6 in
> this case). Nautilus is still somewhat broken, causing a second monitor
> to display a white background, but that existed in 11.10.
>
> The only thing I had to tweak is turning off "sticky edge" on monitors,
> moving a mouse between them was really quite annoying.
>
> I'm going to try some 3d stuff to try and break the ati driver, but I'm
> really hoping with precise some of the video issues have worked out. So
> far so good though, I'd recommend the plunge.
>
> A note on mint:
>
> I'd looked at mint about 3 months ago when I'd upgraded disks on here,
> and I found it didn't support some things I take for granted on a
> "default" install for me like disk encryption and raid. Fedora/RH, Cent
> maybe all seem to support "advanced disk setup", but a lot of the
> "newbie" distros like mint don't, limiting their audience. Odd since
> it's ubuntu-based, but doesn't offer the d-i (server/ncurses) install
> like ubuntu itself does - with default recepies for disk encryption.
>
> I know there are bastard hacks for it, but I expect a disk install for
> it with the encryption. If it at least had the modules, I could assemble
> it manually at least, but it doesn't even have that from what I
> gathered. Maybe when they grow up a bit, as cinnamon on it looked very
> cool.
>
>
> -mb
>
>
>
>
> On 02/10/2012 06:00 PM, Jim March wrote:
>> 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
>>>>> Subscription Options:
>>>>> 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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