A netbook users review of Linux Mint 8

Thursday evening I broke my install on my Eee PC 1000HE in such a way that I needed to recover the data from my /home partition and reinstall the OS. I thought that since I'm waiting for EB4 I may as well just install another distribution and play.

I grabbed a copy of Mint 8, and installed. The installer comes from Ubuntu so there really is no need to rehash it, it works and is relatively bug free.

Once the installation completed I rebooted and logged into my new system. Upon logging in I was informed that there were dozens of updates which I installed and then I rebooted again (a kernel update was among them). When I landed back at the desktop I found that the Mint team had replaced the traditional gnome menu bar with "Mint Menu" which I promptly replaced.

I'm really not a fan of their menu interface. It seemed functional but in my opinion it's more difficult to use than the traditional gnome menu. Users shouldn't have to click Mint -> All Applications and then use a scroll bar to get to the application they need. Seems counter intuitive.

Once I replaced MintMenu, and changed my theme from the default to shiki-brave which I installed, and then I tried to pair my iPhone. No-dice. The bluetooth applet implied that it was pairing, but it never did.

I replaced the default bluetooth software with blueman, and my iPhone paired properly.

Once that was complete I went over to Hulu.com to try watching some TV. It seems that we still don't have smooth full screen video out of the box.

I set /tmp, /var/log, and /var/tmp to ramdisks and set the parent temp directory to /tmp in firefox which seemed to resolve that problem. Full screen flash video, check.

Another thing I did was lower the kernel's use of swap by setting vm.swappiness=0. I have 2GB of RAM, and I'm only using ~300MB with Thunderbird, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Pidgin, etc all open. My computer shouldn't swap just because it can.

OpenOffice.org is in it's typical default state (slow as hell), so I fixed that. I don't understand why distributions elect to skip over the things that people care about like Office Writer being ready for use in 2 seconds rather than 30. It takes longer to open it the first time than it does to properly configure it.

After this I decided I'd go get a snack, so I checked power management to make sure my netbook suspended when I closed the lid, closed the lid, and went off.

Upon returning I found that when I opened the lid and hit space it started to resume but then it locked up. Figuring it was a fluke I held the power button, restarted, and tried it again. !!CRASH!!

So, I went and downloaded kernel 2.6.32 from the mainline kernel ppa hoping that it was just the Karmic kernel that was included in Mint. Now the machine suspends and resumes properly. In addition when you press a silver key out of the box the key had been registering as being pressed twice. With kernel 2.6.32 it is back to normal.

I installed the new power management software I wrote for Eeebuntu 4, and I tweaked two kernel options in grub: force-hpet and elevator=deadline

Powertop battery life estimation: Before: 6 hours; After: 9.5 hours.

I was pretty pleased with how light the installation was. It was trivial to install software from my public and private repositories. In fact all of my needed software installed without issue: Truecrypt, Adobe Reader, Revelation, Cheese, Kindle, Monodevelop, Boxee, Wine, Hulu Desktop, VLC, My new power management software for Eeebuntu, Elite, SimCity 3000, Erics Ultimate Solitaire, Warcraft II, Starcraft, World of Goo, etc.

The default software and codec selection is very nice, it's probably the first time ever that I didn't have to install any codecs. Some examples of the smart choices made by the Mint team are Tomboy, Gimp, Thunderbird, Pidgin, and Gnome Mplayer. Another GREAT decision was the removal of games. These aren't needed by everyone and shouldn't have been installed by default anyway.

With all of my software installed on top of the base installation, / uses 5.9GB (my games use approximately 2.4GB of that). That's not too bad.

Pros: Unlike Karmic, it hasn't crashed (except for suspending), and all of my software is working correctly.

Cons: It still takes a lot of extra configuration that is still far too advanced for a consumer to get good battery life including installing a third party application (in this case my own), and good performance.

Bottom line: This release is what Karmic could have and should have been. It saddens me however that in 2010 we are still missing the little things that would make Linux potentially viable on the desktop.