Mint for Personal Use Laptop

Our story so far (see last three posts for details):

• I have an IBM X30 laptop, built out of many IBM X30 laptops. I tried recently to run OpenSUSE 10.2 on it, but did not have much luck. It runs Mint Linux 2.0 "out of the box" without any issue at all. So that is the Distro it still runs.

• When protests arrive that OpenSUSE 10.2 is better than I think it is based on my experience, I spent the first day of my most recent vacation putting 10.2 on my IBM T41 work laptop, over the top of Fedora Core 6. It works as advertised there. Still using it.

• My wife got a MacBook. Her previous machine was a Toshiba M45 laptop running MS Windows XP home.

• My daughter has been running Linux and Mac's all her life. Only important because it proves you do not have to be a computer person to run Linux, and that she does not put MS Windows traffic on the home network.

After the holidays, I was wandering around the computer stores looking at laptops. I hoped to catch some pre-Vista, post holiday fire sale. Looking for something I could not live without to augment my Linux laptop inventory! Can't....stop....installing...Linux....! At one store I found the current, updated version of my wifes Toshiba laptop. At a similar price point, the new laptop was over twice the machine! Nine months old, and utterly out of date. Sigh. The Pentium M 1.7 was now a Core Duo. Memory was 1GB rather than 512 MB. 120GB disk rather than 80 GB. A webcam included. Fifty USD less than what we gave for her M45 too. Buying technology is always about deciding what you need, what you want to spend, and then waiting for it to hit that price point. It will always get cheaper after you buy it. Wait for it to hit the pricing bottom, you'll never buy anything. Something better will always be that price later.

The M45 looked like a good machine. It's only flaw was to shut down because it got too hot from time to time. This usually led to a bluing of the air in her vicinity when she lost work. But XP would re-boot when the system was cooled down, and it would keep going till the next round of air tinting. Normally I would look up from my Mac or Linux-running-X30 during such episodes to see if the M45 was going to go sailing across the room on it's final trajectory. And to mention to her that the laptop looked like it would make a great Linux laptop. I am a very supportive spouse.

The MacBook entered her life, and is her constant companion. The M45 was stashed in the front room. Cats sat on it, but lost interest since it was no longer warm. And the air remained transparent...well, mostly. The air in the Gulf Coast of Texas is not really transparent, but we are used to the yellowish tint. That doesn't have anything to do with computers or OS's. And NeoOffice Beta has come in for some harsh reviews when it coughs up a hairball on a large spreadsheet. But it's Beta...

I came home from the computer store all excited about the new features of the Toshiba laptops I had seen. She looked up from her shiny white plastic friend, looked totally bored by my recitations, stated flatly “It's not a Mac”, and then went back to work on whatever she was doing. She must have heard me though, because she said a bit later “You might as well take the Toshiba. I don't need it anymore.”

Yoo Hoo! New Linux laptop, here I come!

She wanted the data off the Toshiba's hard drive (nine months of waxy data build up), so I danced over to geeks paradise, Fry's Electronics, looked at some new laptops just for fun, then bought an empty, USB connected, external 2.5” SATA disk bay, and a new laptop SATA disk. And a bag of dark chocolate Hersheys Kisses for the giver of the laptop. I handed her the old M45 XP Home disk in the new enclosure, so she can mine it at her leisure, and also handed over the chocolate. I may have had one of the chocolates too. Who would know? Hey, this was *dark* chocolate we are talking about here. I'm not crazy.

Mint Linux 2.0's CD booted against a fresh internal SATA disk to see what it would do on laptop hardware only nine months old. Scratched case, and the cover to the DVD/CD missing, but still new. Newish. Newer than the X30 by a good bit. I reflected as I booted that I had never run Linux against Toshiba laptop hardware. eMachines, Compaq, HP, Dell, IBM, even Apple. Not Toshiba. I was even more curious how it would work when I realized that hole in my life existed.

These days I expect Linux to deal with older hardware like the X30: there has been enough time for all the bits to be tested and included in the current Distro. My problems with OpenSUSE 10.2 on the X30 were surmountable as well. Mint won it's place on that hard drive because it “Just Worked” (tm). I didn't have to surmount anything. That made it the front runner for the new install on a personal Linux system.

All this build up, for a simple denouement. It just worked. Again. Process was like this:

• Poke a pencil on the button that opens the DVD/CD drawer because that broken cover means there is not button that human fingers can hit anymore.

• Insert Mint 2.0 disk. (2.1 coming soon)

• Power up. Boots LiveCD. Ubuntu looking desktop appears.

• Play with computer. Decide all is well.

• Click install icon on desktop.

• Answer 6 groups of questions: Things like my name, what I want for the password, and whether to use the whole disk or not.

• 20 minutes later, reboot

• Run updater, get 141 updates

• Reboot.

That is it. Mint found the wide-screen, 1280x800 resolution without being told about it. The wireless card (Intel) was set up without any muss or fuss, and went right in to the strongest WAP without asking. I loaded up Wifi Radar package so I could more easily manipulate this, but it worked. Web pages play their Flash objects. YouTube was down for service (I have never seen Google do that before) so I could not test that, but it works on the X30, so I assume it will work better on the faster, wide screened Toshiba. Gmail notifier installed and works. Set power management to hibernate when I close the cover. Close the cover. Wait. Open the cover. Hit power. Some blinking, enter a password, and boom, right back where I was. Almost like a Mac!

No heat issues. Fan comes on from time to time, but like the old eMachines 5312's we used to have (We both had one, identical except hers ran XP, mine ran Fedora Core), it is clear Linux is doing a better job keeping the CPU clock dialed down when the CPU is not in use. I thought that would be the case. I booted the T41 over to MS Windows the other day, to update virus definitions, check in with Marimba for any patches BMC Security had issued recently, and the fan never stopped running. Even after the updating work was done (which took over an hour) it still ran hot till I booted it back to OpenSUSE 10.2.

I have a funny, almost schizo, feeling about how easy this all is. I am not surprised at the over 20,000 packages I can install via Synaptic: Mint is based on Ubuntu, which in turn is based on Debian. layers upon layers. Stratums. In some ways, it is the best example of the way Linux is supposed to work. Take a project like Debian which is chock full of sub projects and packages, add your thing on top, and come up with synergies so that everything just gets better for everyone. But at the same time, this is based on Debian! Even looking at articles like “The well-tempered Debian desktop”, which talk about how much easier Debian is to install now than it was before, it is clear that it is nowhere near as easy to install as the major RPM based Distros like SUSE, RedHat, Mandriva, or the second stratum Debian Distros like Ubuntu, Xandros, or Free/LinSpire. Or the third stratum Debian, Mint. Debian base is easier to install than GenToo I suppose. It still boggles my mind how much easier these Debian derivations are.

There is no more MS Windows at my house, at least not first level. Kinda of weird to think about in a way. All the excitement about MS Vista flashing about and I won't even see it. Instead, I am left wondering what my new Apple phone will be called when I get one (Oh yes: Serious need for that to replace my aging cell phone. Much penny saving to do.). I am guessing the new bit of required hardwares name will not be iPhone though. And a new territory to be explored: how well does Linux speak Bonjour and the other Apple network protocols? It would be pretty silly if the only way I can get to the hard drives on the Mac Mini is via SMB. I suppose NFS is an option. I have already hooked the external disk bays from the Mac Mini up to Linux before: Linux knows HFS+.

I won't be the only kid on the block whose house is not running MS Windows though. They are really close to shipping the OLPC hardware, the XO. Everyone with one of those will be running Linux too.