Linux Mint is an Ubuntu based distro that focuses on simplicity, elegance, and an up to date GNU/Linux desktop. Here is the blurb from DistroWatch.com:
Linux Mint is one of the surprise packages of the past year. Originally launched as a variant of Ubuntu with integrated media codecs, it has now developed into one of the most user-friendly distributions on the market – complete with a custom desktop and menus, several unique configuration tools, a web-based package installation interface, and a number of different editions. Perhaps most importantly, this is one project where the developers and users are in constant interaction, resulting in dramatic, user-driven improvements with every new release. DistroWatch has spoken to the founder and lead developer of Linux Mint, Clement Lefebvre, about the history of the distribution.
Linux Mint Desktop
One of the best ideas behind Linux Mint is that things should work out of the box, period. So even my fairly new Atheros wifi card in the laptop was recognized without issue, something that Ubuntu 8.10 was unable to do. Also, there are enough multimedia codecs to make anyone happy.
Mint also uses their own package repositories, the Ubuntu repositories, and the apt repos for Debian, allowing you to search between them all individually to find the right package. A very nice touch if you ask me.
All in all there is not a whole lot that I can say is bad about this distro. I like it much better than Ubuntu, I really like the look and feel of it all, the menus are great, hardware recognition is on better than 95% of the distros out there, and it’s Debian based.
The one big issue that I did notice is when I attempted to install Mint on the my laptop;s hdd. I did not want to do a full install but had planned to dual-boot with Vista, I use it for work, make Mint the primary and set up a virtual session to the Vista partition. Sounds fine, but the Mint partitioner failed when attempting to re-partition the free space. It sat at 0% for abotu an hour and a half before prompting me that the partioning tool failed.
At this point I was fairly frightened that I had just nuked the hdd and lost my work essentials in the process (I know I know I should have backed it all up). So I rebooted into Vista and watched intently and chkdsk worked for about an hour to repair the damage done to the partition. Once it was finished, Vista came back to life with no data lost (extremely happy).
So I then decided to install it on a USB drive and just run Mint persistently. I decided that this would be a great time to try out a few different methods for installing to a pen drive, something that in years past was a bit of a daunting task.
First I went and found a tool I heard about from Veronica Belmont on Tekzilla, Unetbootin. Unetbootin is a simple windows app that will install from an ISO or will download an entire distro for you. It will copy all of the files over and then make the pen drive bootable. Since I already had the Linux Mint iso I did that option and had a bootable pen drive in about 5 minutes.
Unetbootin Interface
I did try the Distribution selector first and installed Slax, which is KDE based and although it found my wifi adapter I could not get KwifiManager to actually use it to save my life.
Next I tried a micro-distribution that I had heard about and thought “what the hell” called SliTaz. I have to admit that this little guy really agreed with my minimalistic nature. It was really fast as the entire thing loads to RAM when it starts by default, its only an 80MB filesystem and a 30MB iso.
I honestly think that if I had the opportunity to really start hashing away at it I might switch to this little distro in the future. The major drawback for me was that there was no wifi support built into it’s kernel at all. oh well.
So all in all I am exceptionally pleased with Linux Mint and plan on using it as my main distro for the foreseeable future. I would actually recommend it over Ubuntu for Linux newbies and regulars out there alike.
Update! – Unetbootin will not create a persistent flash install as it turns out. After hours of setting up Linux Mint last night I turned it on this morning and realized that it was not actually persistent at all. So I recreated the flash drive from the ISO and from the tutorial at PendriveLinux. All is well again.
