Back in April the fellas at Ubuntu released a much anticipated Hardy Heron. Due to be an LTS release (supported till 2011), many people found this actually a regress from the previous Gutsy Gibbon due to stability problems on many systems. Unfortunately I was unable to run Gutsy and its derivatives on my system due to graphics problems and so I cannot vouch for this myself.
Linux mint is a distro which forked off Ubuntu Edgy but has mirrored many of the changes in ubuntu since, resulting in a very close matched distro which can run off of Ubuntu’s repos. In the weeks after the Hardy let-down many people began popping over to the linux mint community and asking whether the next release synchronous to Hardy, codenamed “Elyssa” would suffer from the same problems. The developers remained optimistic, and it sure payed off.
Installation
Everything ran pretty smooth, including a much faster boot time of the live CD than in previous versions. Many people have commented on trouble with selecting their location on the world map as it moves too fast however I had much less trouble here than when installing Ubuntu Hardy. On first login you will also be presented with ‘mintAssistant’, this is a little tool developed for linux mint for configuration of the root account (which is recommended to be disabled) and whether or not to display fortunes in the terminal. In previous mint versions these fortunes just displayed a short line of pointless and occasionally humorous text however now we have to put up with a moose or a penguin in ASCII art saying them for you. Personally I do like the single line fortunes as they occasionally spark a small giggle but after a while the moose just gets plain annoying as it takes up half of your terminal window before you’ve even started! Please for Mint 6 can we have an option to disable the animals and just keep the text?
Desktop
The default artwork is clean, simple and overall quite an improvement on that of ubuntu’s brown muddy feeling (as opposed to mint’s minty fresh feeling!). Gnome’s default menu seriously lacks user friendliness and so the folks at mint have come up with ‘mintMenu’. mintMenu is based on the USP (Ubuntu System Panel, which incidentally I believe is based on SLED from SUSE), it now features a few quick tools from right clicking on an application in the menu, the must useful being ‘launch when I log in’ which is a lot easier and simpler for new users than useing the session dialogue and ‘Uninstall’ giving the ability to uninstall an app without the hassle of starting up synaptic and finding it which takes quite some time.
mintTools
A new tool to Elyssa is mintBackup, the aim of this tool is to be a simple way to back up your home folder. You are presented with two tabs, ‘excluded paths’ and ‘hidden paths’. Excluded Paths allows you to select files and folders you do not want to be included in your backup such as ISO files which are too big and easily replaced to bother. Hidden Paths allows you to choose which hidden folders in your home directory are backed up, the default being none of them. When I last needed to backup my home directory I found mintBackup to be too much hassle and that it was easier to just copy files in nautilus to an external hard disk. If I were to make regular backups I may be persuaded to use the mintBackup tool if it saved my backup options of hidden and excluded paths so that after the first run I can just open it up and hit backup and it will use the options previously set, resulting in a much quicker and easier backup. Unfortunately it does not do this and so mintBackup is redundant on my system for now.
mintDesktop is a small tool for configuring extra little bits of your gnome desktop. Most of the options in here are small things like which icons appear on your desktop and the nautilus mode which I leave at their default options. The most interesting function in this new release though is the ability to turn on gnome-compositing, a feature included into gnome 2.22 but with no way to turn it on. Gnome-compositing gives you shadows around windows, live previews when using ALT-Tab and transparency for widgets to mention some of the few effects which in my opinion seem to make a considerable enhancement to usability without the resource drain of compiz etc.
mintInstall is the gui frontend for the .mint software portal where there are already 475 applications for Elyssa. Its also functions as a frontend for GetDeb and the APT repositories. While I hardly ever use GetDeb as the extensive apt repositories and software portal usually cater for all my software needs the apt frontend is great for finding and installing an application you do not know the name of, so cant use the terminal but don’t want to start up synaptic as it is not the speediest or easiest of apps to run.
mintUpdate is an improvement on the ‘Update Manager’ in Ubuntu with updates split into 5 ratings on their stability and thus how safe they are for your system. You can then set which of these ratings you want to show and which you want to install automatically. I am still having problems though with the app not automatically refreshing, saying that though at this exact moment in time it has just found new updates on it own so maybe that problem is a problem no more! The only drawback of mintUpdate against Ubuntu is the inability to update from one version of mint to another, this however is planned for mint 6 after it being suggested in the friendly community.
Applications
Ubuntu released 8.04 with firefox 3 beta 5. This confused me, an LTS release with an application as key as firefox in beta. When mint 5 was in beta testing it also included the beta 5 version of firefox and I found the constant random crashing such a problem that I removed it completely, surely for an LTS this cannot be right. But then for the final release the folks at mint swapped it for RC1 and did some extra fiddling and then BAM no problems at all, thanks mint (and too bad Ubuntu).
The default audio player was set as rhythmbox, resulting in many people complaining as they view AmaroK to be a much better option. Lead developer Clement Lefebvre had this to say on the matter:
“The first problem with Amarok was its size. A lot of new applications came in Elyssa and this wouldn’t have been possible if we had kept Amarok. Rhythmbox is much smaller in size and this is quite important when fitting every component on a single liveCD. The second problem was the way Amarok was packaged… the upstream maintainers assumed that Amarok users necessarily used KDE, and so Amarok came with some KDE dependencies which resulted in showing KDE-specific elements in the menu. Of course we could hide these menu items but the point here is that the development/packaging of Amarok wasn’t done in a desktop-agnostic way.. it was closely tied to KDE. Finally, Rhythmbox was significantly easier to use for first-time users and its interface was much less impressive than the one in Amarok. There are less features in Rhythmbox than there are in Rhythmbox.. but if we look at somebody who never used Linux before and wants to plug-in his/her iPod and start doing simple things.. the use case apppears to be significantly easier with Rhythmbox.”
Well I see Banshee as a step between the two and would be a great alternative to Rhythmbox as it has the the simplicity of Rhythmbox but is more user friendly (in my opinion) and there are some great plugins to spice it up too. Songbird is looking promising with version 0.6 released today but It doesn’t replace my Banshee with ease of use just yet!
Thunderbird is the default mail client in mint but I cant stand the thing and have replaced it with evolution. I believe I am a minority though so I shan’t blabber on much about it.
There used to be a mint tool called mintDisk for managing the mounting of NTFS partitions, and now NTFS partitions are only mounted once clicked on. As all my music is stored in the ‘My Music’ folder of my windows partion, I have to open it up in nautilus (to mount it) before the music app will be able to play the music. To get around this I have simply installed ntfs-config from the repos and all my problems are solved by simply checking a single box, the NTFS partitions are mounted at startup. Could this not be useful for many other people if it were included as standard?
Other Quick Points
Again it could just be personal preference but the default GDM theme doesn’t really do it for me. The folks at fedora on the other-hand have some pretty swish and professional looking GDM’s in their last few releases. Maybe the palette needs to be lightened a tad?
Very fast and no buggy problems that were so common in Ubuntu. Cheers!
Conclusion
In conclusion my fingers are very tired from all this typing, but the developers of mint’s must be even worse with all the hard work put in over the past few months to make this release the best ever since the projects birth. Its also great to have a community where the developers listen, and act on the feedback of their users. I feel a lot more comfortable asking for assistance in the mint community than in the vast prairies of the ubuntu forums. Without Linux Mint I would probably still be typing (much more slowly) in windows so thanks for giving me freedom (and elegance).
Alec
Further Reading
Linux Mint Homepage - http://www.linuxmint.com
Linux Mint community - http://www.linuxmint.com/forum
Ubuntu - http://www.ubuntu.com
Gay Hacker Elyssa Review - http://gayhacker.wordpress.com/2008/06/09/linux-mint-5-review/
Distrowatch page - http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mint
I am fairly new to linux and this is my first distribution review so if I have made any errors please leave a comment bellow so I can ensure they are fixed. Thank you.
I have previously tried openSUSE 10.2 after the screenshots from their website drew me in but after install I was very disappointed with it as things that were easy to get running in Ubuntu and its derivatives appeared rather difficult. That experience has rather put me off openSUSE so I shall not be reviewing it but seeing as it was released today I decided to gather some information and links etc for you all.
This Gimp hack is quite well known in the Linux community, however those who have only recently moved from windows may not of heard of it and it is those people who it benefits most. Once installed it will transform the layout of your Gimp installation into something very similar to that of Adobe Photoshop, enabling those used to Photoshop an easier transition into the world of open source. Mind you Photoshop does run out of the box in wine now (after installing some fonts).
“MyPaint is a fast and easy painting application. It lets you focus on the art instead of the program. It comes with a large brush collection including charcoal and ink to emulate natural painting. Other features are: support for pressure sensitive graphic tablets, unlimited canvas (you never have to re-size, undo, fast, no layers (work in progress), using pygtk with C extensions. If you want to look deeper, MyPaint is built around a highly configurable brush engine. This allows you to experiment with your own brushes and with not-quite-natural painting.” While this is currently very basic, it has a lot of potential if people support the project well.
Songbird 0.6 was released to the public last week, and its already looking pretty swish. It promises to be the Firefox of media players (being built on a Mozilla base) with ‘feathers’ (skins) and extensions freely available from their website. One of the biggest features of songbird though is its large integration with the web, providing a built in web browser and integration with many Internet music services. Unfortunately it does lack integration with the Linux desktop so for the moment I shall be sticking to Banshee however this project is looking very promising.
Basically its free television on your computer through the Internet; High Definition, YouTube, RSS feeds, this thing does the lot. It really is quite a powerful package with hundreds of free TV channels to watch. A fast Internet connection is essential though as the high definition video files come in rather large, taking quite a while to download each video. Personally I prefer the TV over the air but Miro is certainly worth a look!
