Mint 2.2 for office and home use

It would be fair to say that I am moderately comfortable with technical change. Not counting SLAB. One of the defining characteristics about a System Programmer is probably that they like to install new operating systems just to see what the new stuff is. The old MS XP advertisement asked the question "Where do you want to go today". A likely answer by the system programmer: "I don't know... where can I? What does this thing do?"

That is a shared characteristic of every really good Sysprog I have ever met anyway.

I booted and tested MS Vista on my personal Linux laptop recently, not because I intend to run MS Vista on it, but because I was curious. I am always curious...

The folks at the Mint project appear to live to keep people like me happy. Mint has revved three times off it's Ubuntu 6.10 parentage. Most recently is Linux Mint 2.2, codenamed "Bianca".

This is Not About Being Stable!

Not completely anyway. Frontier versions of Linux are clearly not for everyone. I recently read a review of Linux where the reviewer concluded that, since it was not exactly like what they already knew, it had no value, and he would wait for it to be exactly like what he wanted. Needless to say, he will never be happy.

Frontier Linuxii change. A lot. All the time. If a day goes by where I don't get an update to FC6 or one of the Ubuntu derivatives, it is a quiet day. To build a real corporate Linux desktop, one would really really hate to be the Change Manager for something that comes out in a major version as often as Mint. Or even the non-LTS versions of Ubuntu.

There is the reason why there are things like Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support), SUSE SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop), and Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS or Desktop. Just like in the server room, there are stable places to be. By "stable", I mean "Places where the rate of change is slow, controlled, and changes are driven from a centralized, managed place".

ITIL 101: Unmanaged change = bad.

Too little change is stagnation though. It is always a balancing act.

So far, Ubuntu 6.10, Mint 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2 have all been plenty stable places for me. Clearly the management of change *inside* the Mint project has been pretty good. My situation is not production IT either: My day job has plenty of Linux in it of course, what with trying to figure out all the support versions we need to have deployed to support all out products, and the the Linux based infrastructure. I also spend my nights and weekends working with this to see what else it can do. Where it is going. I am in essence moonlighting as a Linux system programmer, if only to make sure when I show up for things like Linuxworld I am somewhat informed.

Ok. Fine. Truth be told, I'd do it even without needing to get ready for SHARE or Linuxworld. It is interesting and fun. Like the great Richard Feynman talks about in one of his books, it is the " Pleasure of Finding Things Out". Linux System Programming edition.

Updating the Laptop First

My desktop system is where I live. It is where I read my email, run my email filters, do my calendaring, write documents and spreadsheets and Wiki pages. Etc. It is the last place I land changes to versions of Linux I am using.

Like any good IT person with a test environment ahead of their production world, I first installed Mint 2.2 over Ubuntu 6.10 on my personal Acer 5610. My office production Linux desktop system gets no unverified changes. And my personal production system is a Mac, so it does not intersect this except when I am testing things inside a Parallels VM on it.

A Disk Layout Annoyance

Mint and its parent Ubuntu always want to install to my '/home' partition by default. They utterly ignore the juicy special partition I have set aside for '/'. I guess this because '/home' is the biggest partition on the hard drive. The special '/' partition must seem small, dull and uninteresting to the installer.

Despite the installers apparent lack of interest, It would be really irritating to have my '/home' formatted and overwritten. Even disk-to-disk, backups and restores take forever. This is the way the laptop is laid out then (Note: Sata disks are given sd* names, just like SCSI):

fdisk /dev/sda



Command (m for help): p



Disk /dev/sda: 120.0 GB, 120034123776 bytes

255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14593 cylinders

Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes



Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/sda1 1 892 7164958+ 27 Unknown

/dev/sda2 * 893 2422 12289725 6 FAT16

/dev/sda3 2423 3697 10241437+ 83 Linux

/dev/sda4 3698 14593 87522120 5 Extended

/dev/sda5 3698 3952 2048256 82 Linux swap / Solaris

/dev/sda6 3953 14593 85473801 83 Linux

Vista is spinning on /dev/sda1 (The Acer supplied Vista restore partition. Annoying. I wish they would just give me the install disks) and on /dev/sda2. Sda2 shows here as FAT16 but it is really NTFS.

The installer-ignored '/' is in /dev/sda3. '/home' is in installer-preferred /dev/sda6.

It just takes a bit of over-riding the default install to make it put '/' over the top of the old '/ ' and leave '/home' alone (Insert movie reference here. Or not. As you like it. Insert Shakespeare play reference here... ). It is not hard to over-ride, but it sure is critical to get correct the first time, or you will be restoring things.

I don't know if it matters, but I have the installer format the '/' and swap (sda5) partitions before the install.

It would be nice if disk/partition labels were used. Linux supports them. /etc/fstab understands them. Other distros leverage them. Ubuntu and kin seem oddly behind the times in this regard.

A SLAB-like Annoyance

I was a bit worried about this Mint 2.2 upgrade at first. When I booted the Acer on the Mint 2.2 LiveCD, the default look and feel of Gnome was gone. SUSE-itis had set in. A new OpenSUSE 10.2ish, SLAB looking menu was there. Nothing across the top of the screen, everything on the bottom. More KDE / MS Windows, less OS.Xish.

Really: If I wanted KDE, I would be running Kubuntu. Their install of KDE is lovely. Much nicer looking that Gnome trying to be KDE like. I am hardly a purist here: I run KDE apps under Gnome and Gnome apps under KDE all the time. Neither desktop solution, at the end of the day, has every app I want, like, or need.

I started to wonder if this SLAB thing was one change in Linux/Gnome 'user interface paradigm' I was just not going to be able to resist. Not for lack of trying but because of some larger inertia to homogenize the look and feel of Gnome. User interface peer group pressure so that everyone and their cat was going to do either SLAB or something like it. I had visions of bailing out of 2.2 back to 2.1 or Ubuntu 6.10 shortly after the install. Then, later, of being an old technical hermit in the cave someplace that only has 802.11g, still running Mint 2.1 long after the world had moved on to whatever the next big SLAB thing was.

Sigh. I poked at it a bit, and actually it was a bit better than SLAB. Less clicks to do things. Better defaults of what is on the menu, at least for me. I still was not thrilled. It was needless worry.

Clicking the install icon on the LiveCD desktop (one of two icons), overriding the disk partitions, and turning it loose, the LiveCD rolled an install down in about 15 minutes. A reboot, and there was my old desktop, and Gnome laid out the way I wanted it, with the menus at the top, and running tasks at the bottom. As my mom always tells me: I wasted a worry!

With '/home' preserved, Mint 2.2 found my default settings (which means it found my /home/steve, matched it to the new user 'steve' I had just entered on the install dialog, and set it up correctly) and put everything back to Gnomeish looking defaults. I was a very happy camper. I may have to give up my Luddite ways and eat SLAB someday, but today is not that day, and neither is tomorrow.

I had to tweak the install a bit with Synaptic:

• Take Evolution-Beagle off to prevent Exchange server beat-down. Ubuntu doesn't put Beagle on by default because it is not 1.0 release ready. Mint does, and so I take Beagle back off in general. Sure, I like Spotlight on the Mac, but Beagle is not the same thing. Not yet. Even if Beagle was ready, I'd still have to take off the Beagle-Evolution bit, as explained in the linked post.
• Take off Mono: Same thing as above. I get constant messages about Mono failing. I don't use Mono for anything, so off it comes. The only downside I can see is that the f-spot photo manager comes off as a co-req of some kind. I have no idea why f-spot would care about Mono, but I have plenty of options that are Mono-less for photo management on Linux. I use Google Picasa when I am not on the Mac. If the Mac had it, I would use it there too.
• Roll on Gnome-Office, because I like Gnumeric as a fast way to look at spreadsheets. Loads way faster then oocalc. I use oocalc when I am working with MS generated macros, to be sure.
• I was going to put on 915resolution, but Mint already figured out I needed it. This is sort of a reverse of the first point above: I have no idea why Ubuntu does not install this by default.
• OpenOffice is already 2.1: Nothing to do there.
• Put on lmsensors, and related things, because on my laptop I like to know how hot things are getting and where. I have three thermal zones visible on the Acer.
• Set the color theme back to Mint 2.1's: I like Blue. What can I say?
• X3270 and tsclient: gotta have those for work.
• gkrellm: Requisite desktop bling.
• Install and test vmware-player. This one is critical to the Linuxworld lab. If I can't run a VM on the laptop I am not going to be able to use the Linux version.
• Test out Codeweavers Crossover office. Sometimes Codeweavers does not totally like a new version of KDE or Gnome. Not that it won't run, just that how menus are set up changes and Crossover has to be updated with the new way of doing things. Gnome is 2.16.1 under Mint 2.2, and there are no issues. Again, this is as much about the Linuxworld lab as anything. I show Codeweavers at the lab and talk about it, so it has to work.
• Some other things that are just my moving back in to the laptop. Gmail notifier, etc.

Next, the Office Desktop

Once I had verified everything looked good and was stable, and the Acer ran Mint 2.2 for a week or so without issue, I rolled 2.2 on to the office desktop system. All the same tweaks as for the laptop except the hardware sensors and 915resolution. Same over-ride of the disk partitions. This takes about 30 minutes to install, update and tweak, and I'm up and running on the new Mint 2.2. My desktop returns as I had it. Evolution works just like it did before.

Nice work there Mint. I think this is where I'll stay, at least until I change it again. :)

Seriously though, the new Ubuntu 7 'Feisty Fawn' and Linspire combo burrito will need to be evaluated shortly after Linuxworld is over, so that is probably where the Acer will be headed next. Between here and there I am going to need some stability so I can focus on Linuxworld. Change is good, but not too much, and not too close to a time with me standing in front of a room full of people trying to show them Linux things. Best be things I have tested!