Slashdot Mirror
Linux Mint 14 Is Out
New submitter medge_42 sends words that Linux Mint 14 has been released. Check out their list of features and release notes to see what's new. One version uses MATE 1.4, which includes some long-needed bug fixes as well as functional bluetooth and mate-keyring, its own character map, fast alt-tabbing, and improvements to Caja. The other version uses Cinnamon 1.6, which contains a huge number of fixes and new features including its own file browser, persistent workspaces and a window quicklist to go with them, a notifications applet, an improved sound applet, and alt-tab graphical improvements. MDM now supports legacy GDM 2 themes and userlists, and has improved user switching. Gedit 2.30 has replaced Gedit 3, and MintStick replaces USB-ImageWriter.
I still find that for sheer ability to work on nearly any system and those with minimal resources, it's an excellent idea to keep a Mint 10 LXDE live DVD laying around. Darn thing will run on just about anything. It's practically become my new Knoppix.
So many volunteers and so many packages - just thanks everyone for another release !
It has too many things that help content creation. The gui supports the mouse, gives you the ability to change it, and worse lets you have more than one Windows open at a time!
Screw that. Where is the crappy cell phone interface? I want to be hip and have my productivity limited so I can save 10 whole pixels on my 27 inch dual screens and tweet to my friends, which is why I purchased my Icore7 extreme edition! Now I can read a document and cut and paste things into another app at the same time which is sooo 2000s.
This is too technical to get my brain around Mate and this whole concept of multitasking that I need my shiny things back. Going back to WIndows 8.
http://saveie6.com/
Ramblings ...
I love my KDE 4.9x/Kubuntu 12.10 install except for the flakiness that the poxy virtuoso/nepomuk/akonadi brings to it. Thats what I find attractive about the gnome derivatives - they haven't bet the farm on integrating their environments with the buggy unstable CPU hogging piece of crap that is nepomuk/virtuoso.
But I find gnome unattractive compared to KDE and I dislike Unity & Gnome Shell. But I do like where Cinnamon is going and this latest rev looks quite good.
If only I could find a decent gnome based Pim - I love Kontact, when its not being ass reamed by nepomuk/virtuoso. Thunderbird is getting creaky, Evolution is OK but not as slick as Kontact.
can you upgrade a mint 13 system?
For production machines, you would use the Long Term Support version, which currently comes with 5 years of support.
For most people it has been 3 major releases in 8 years. 6.06, 8.04, 10.04, and 12.04. You can expect another major release in nearly 2 years. Plus the variations of Ubuntu like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc which are the same distribution but with a different set of default packages. You can grab mini.iso and pick through every variant on a large list if you want.
I couldn't agree with you more!
Besides the terrible gui that supports multitasking and the ability for us to think for ourselves and choose what we want, is having something younger than 11 years old! That means change and we can't have any of that. Just ask any (l)user at work? THey will tell you IE 7, and XP work just fine thank you very much.
What we need is the console with a green color as the background just like in 2001. We just type startx or ./xf86config and manually enter the monitors horizontal and vertical frequencies (careful not to fry your CRT bigscreen) and then xdm choose either fvwm or gnome-shell with a custom script that prevents the ability of having more than one window open at a time. That way we could be sooo hip and cutting edge or hate change and everyone is happy.
Before you know it these new folks will tell us it is a good idea to upgrade your OS and run apt-get update. The nerve! We do not have all our Windows Server 2003 locked at May 28th 2009 (no updates afterwards) for DerpCRM so our 1 guy can just put out fires all day and not run the whole IT department. Pffft it is a cost center and I am glad all our financial trading is on such a critical platform that handles 15 trillion in dollars. Kids today l...
It aint broke just leave them and never touch them because our accountant said so in 2006 when Vista came out so this means any updated software after that is bad and will cause financial ruin and collapse the whole world economy. ... going back to my Redhat 6.2 box.
http://saveie6.com/
I wish these guys were in charge of gnome. Talk about getting it.
A quick question; why can't I have both mate and cinnamon installed on the same system. I'd have thought that was the most obvious gnome stupidity to get rid of?
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
I am loving Mint. I had a look at Mint 13 a while ago, and Ubuntu 12.10. I downloaded the Mint 14 RC a few nights ago.
And I liked what I saw enough to dive into something Linux-ie on my desktop. And I decided I prefer KDE for my desktop. And I prefer regular updates to big version changes, so I opted for LMDE KDE. I actually stuck around long enough to have an opinion on gnome vs KDE. The KDE menu is awesome - like a highly customizable version of the Windows 7 Start - very impressed.
So I'm dual booting Windows 8 and Mint - and Mint is getting a lot more use at the moment. In fact, if I could just find a way to get the bloody Steam beta to install on Mint, I'd spend even more time there. But I know it will come as they sort things out.
I switched to Mint when Ubuntu forced Gnome 3/Unity on me. Been extremely happy except one big issue. Mate uses GTK 2 but newer apps use GTK 3, so you get stuck in this world of mixed themes that looks bad. Found a nice gtk 2/3 clearlooks compatible theme, so I end up with Mate DM with GTK 3 apps looking normal again. Best thing, Compiz still works...
While I'm very grateful of what Canonical has done for the Linux community and have paid for services and software to show my support, I cant take the design choices or direction the company has went seriously. Gnome 3 has chosen a new direction, one that I don't need or want. Ubuntu is embracing that direction.
Mint right now is the best balance I can find out there. Keeps the popular Ubuntu base, but with Mint or Cinnamon DE which is hands down superior to Gnome 3 for the desktop.
Read here!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Having everyone use linux would need big changes. If the masses can't figure out how to use an os themselves within about 10 seconds they start rioting, anything remotely confusing would have to be deeply hidden (so they don't accidentally open command prompt and freak out), and good luck getting them to customize anything that isn't the simplest of GUI. The Linux crowd aren't paid enough to put up with those people, let apple or maybe MS do it.
Rocket Surgeon.
Anyone know if this... or any other debian distro... can support 4 monitors? I run Ubuntu on most of my machines, but my main desktop has a motherboard with dual graphics cards and four (large) monitors. I'm running windows 7 which allows me a nice continuous desktop with all the eye candy, but I'd like to move to a debian based distro (I'm agnostic over what UI I use) but when I tried this 6 months ago with Ubuntu 12.04 and the corresponding Kubuntu/MiNT variants none would support 4 monitors without sever limitations.
But when is it going to ship with Unity? The desktop is so old-fashioned and clunky looking.
Calm down, it will take some time: it's hard to reinvent the wheel :P
Things can be broken out of the box providing it's easy enough for the person to fix (and be the right price). I may have been a bit harsh on the masses, i appreciate an OS that works well easily as well, i just don't think linux will ever be like that (without great changes that would remove what linux holds dear). It's very powerful in the right hands, but usually the people that need/want that kind of power have the right hands any way.
Rocket Surgeon.
A quick question; why can't I have both mate and cinnamon installed on the same system.
You probably can. A major reason for renaming everything in MATE was to allow co-existence with Gnome 3-based systems (which would include Cinnamon). You'll get one from the installation media, and can install the other from the repositories, then choose which you want to run at login time. However, each is a complete desktop (MATE rather more so) so you probably only need one.
You know the full-disk encryption in Ubuntu stores the passphrase in cleartext on sector 0x7Gh on the hard disk, don't you?
You are not supposed to put both '0x' and 'h' to indicate a hex number.
I wish they'd wait until all the DE versions are ready, and release them all simultaneously. Also, if they are supporting XFCE and LXDE, wish they'd add Razor-qt support as well
... if you want Unity
You can
You pick which desktop environment to use at login. Your choice becomes the default so you don't have to choose every time you log in.
I installed Cinnamon on Ubuntu 12.10 through a PPA and I'm liking it a lot. Is there any reason why I would want to switch from this setup over to the actual Mint?
Trisquel, Dyne:bolic and GNewSense are all based on Ubuntu, just like Mint is, but are Libre distros. So take any of them, which will give you your Libre kernel and then take a Mint DVD and then install all the liberated stuff you find there to that base system. Should give ya the same thing. Of course, had Mint put what you sanctimoniously called 'Designed for Crap' out there, the FSF wouldn't endorse them - just see their approach to Debian, which all this is based off in the first place.
On this day in history thousands of new versions of software were released.
Many of them far cooler, way more interesting and useful than this one.
If you have found something even cooler, you must submit them as articles to Slashdot. Ever noticed that "xxxxx writes" in beginning of each article? That's how stuff gets published here.
Woosh.
These hex numbers go to G.
So can you boot this version with a newish nvidia card? Cause last time I checked, it used nouveau as default, which fails massively for any newer nvidia cards. All I get it a screen with white blocks. Why linux distros insist on using an alpha video card driver to boot the system for the first time is beyond me.
Doesn't it make sense to use a generic one that will work with everything and then let the person choose to install the alpha one (or propitiatory one)?
That's not a hex number, that's his signing key in cleartext.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
But still.
I am really liking Mint 14/Cinnamon so far, which surprised me since I never particularly liked mint or cinnamon when I tried them in the past. Mint 13 with cinnamon just seemed kind of buggy and unpolished to me. Linux mint 14 just works perfectly for me, one of the best out of the box linux experiences I've ever had. They fixed a ton of issues in cinnamon 1.6 and added some useful features. Cinnamon has now become my preferred DE. I really like that cinnamon maintains a sane interface, while being built on the modern gnome-shell/mutter base; so its got solid and well integrated compositing and useful features like scale out of the box (and compiz has always been buggy for me, so I'm always glad when I can avoid it). Cinnamon maintains a good balance between customizability, features, eye candy, and polish.
I never run a compositor so I guess this requires even fewer CPU resources. Really, I like black backgrounds on my terminals fine.
You also get duplicated entries in Preferences etc. (well, those seem to come from me installing LXDE, Cinnamon only put a shortcut to a control panel). also I'm running Mate, which uses nautilus 2.x (renamed) caja for the desktop window, but the default file manager has changed to Nautilus 3.x. I could change the desktop file manager to Nautilus 3.x in gconf-editor or something, but I reverted back, dunno why (I guess I didn't want to re-arrange the icons)
You are not supposed to put both '0x' and 'h' to indicate a hex number.
That's not a hex number, that's his signing key in cleartext.
That's amazing! I've got the same combination on my luggage!
:-P
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
He's referring to this. It's from last year, but Mint is still ahead of Ubuntu in those metrics.
I still expect Ubuntu has more users total, but that's not going to last forever.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Oops, messed up my link:
He's referring to this
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Distrowatch ranking has nothing to do with the number of people using a distribution, just the number curious about it. People have already heard of ubuntu for years.
This space intentionally left blank
If the masses can't figure out how to use an os themselves within about 10 seconds they start rioting
I've put Linux on clueless, computer-illiterate users' machines for years. Without fail, they all found Mandriva and kubuntu easier to use than Windows. When it comes to useability (especially discoverability), Windows suck big time. From what I've read, W8 and Unity are tied for the #1 unusable OSes (I haven't tried either one).
They all especially like the fact that their computer is faster with Linux than with Windows, and that they don't have to call me every two weeks because it doesn't work at all because they've stupidly installed some trojan.
Free Martian Whores!
Do you remember all the people freaking out when Microsoft gave them vista? If not just look at what is happening with windows 8, any fairly computer literate person would have it setup and running well for them in a hour or so, but the masses are terribly confused.
Rocket Surgeon.
Oh yeah of course, if you set it up, make sure all the devices and hardware are working, save a shortcut or two and point them in the direction of the software center (explain they can't just download stuff and double click), they will be fine (I've done it for a few people, kde mint is my weapon of choice), but are you willing to do that for all the noobs, for free. Windows generally haven't really been for the noobs either (that's why IT departments are so big) if you want it to work well you have to be willing to dive into settings and commands. To put the start menu back in windows 8 (fixing 98% of user problems) you just have to type %ProgramData%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs into the new toolbar dialog box (to fix the other 2% you just need to delete programs); if that is too hard for the a lot windows users, i don't like your chances talking them through why their wifi card isn't working.
Rocket Surgeon.
are they going to implement rolling updates?????!!!!!!
alive to the universe, dead to the world