Linux Mint 17 KDE Released

sfcrazy writes The Linux Mint team has announced the release of Linux Mint 17 KDE codenamed Qiana. It's based on KDE Software Compilation 4.13.0. There are notable improvements in Mint Display Manager (MDM). The multi-monitor display has improved and it allows a user to “configure which of the monitors should be used as the primary monitory by MDM.” Users can also define a background color or a background picture no matter what greeter they are using.

Comments

Bugger

[Rik Sweeney]

I only just installed Kubuntu 14.04 over the weekend. Can't be arsed to go through all that again.

Re:Bugger

[Blaskowicz]

It should be a 20 / 30 minute job, including copying over most or all all your .files and .directories.

Re:Bugger

[Skarjak]

I think I'm one of those freaks of nature who actually enjoys installing a new linux distro on his computer. It's like an adventure!

Re:Bugger

[John Bokma]

Ah, yeah, should. In my experience the safe way, however, is to have taken notes during the previous install, doing a fresh install, and install and configure everything using those aforementioned notes (which now and then requires some research to get it right due to changes, and hence updating notes). Of course photos, movies, music, etc. can be safely restored from backup.

Re:Bugger

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here, only I do it in a virtual machine.

Re:Bugger

[Blaskowicz]

In this particular case the OS are almost identical, with Mint having their own front-end (cross-DE) for updating, configuring package sources etc. and some sugar like the flash player installed by default.
Most customizations will relate to Ubuntu (they will be the same) or KDE - I'm not familiar with it but I guess everything is in ~/.kde or ~/.config/kde.

Of course it's a bit boring but there's some worth in having a "disaster plan" by being able to do this crap very quickly.

Re:Bugger

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I'm one of those freaks of nature who actually enjoys installing a new linux distro on his computer. It's like an adventure!

Um, yes, but most only go into a VM (KDE distros like Mint and PCLinuxOS included), and so do new editions of whatever we're running. That's how I avoided the whole Unity crapola and consequently shifted from Ubuntu to Xubuntu. Currently we use Xubuntu 14.04 LTS, Xubuntu 12.04 LTS, and Emmabuntüs (based on Xubuntu 12.04 LTS).

Re:Bugger

[John Bokma]

My disaster plan is keeping track of each apt-get install xxxxx and write down how I configured what I installed afterwards. And then there are still surprises, like how Apache changed its defaults going to 2.4 (IIRC). It's a lot more work compared to install new version and rsync -avh from backup, but all those notes I keep come in handy when I have to install something for a customer in a VM, etc.

Re:Bugger

[rubycodez]

are you pretty good with linux admin?

linux mint is built on ubuntu, so just point toward the proper linux mint kde 17 repository list (most of which will be same as yours) and apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade

then smooth out the rough edges.

I've done this plenty of times, but only do it if you're pretty handy and experienced with linux admin

Re:Bugger

[Anonymous Coward]

This is certainly up for discussion, but in my opinion it is always nice to have two operating systems running simultaneously while you're on an install. On two independent hardware architectures of course. Then you can lookup information on one screen/OS while you install the second OS. I think I've just spotted some of these OS relevant install-note-sheets. :>

Re:Bugger

[dimeglio]

Can't blame you. Love installing just about any OS. I'm going to miss this when we all go to the "cloud connected with OS pre-installed" systems.

Re:Bugger

[Hognoxious]

linux mint is built on ubuntu

Unless it's linux mint debian edition.

Re:Bugger

[rubycodez]

and lo and behold you can do the same trick of turning Debian into LMDE

Re:Bugger

[hazem]

I actually have a freshinstall.sh that I've built that does quite a few of the things I want to happen to a clean system (add/remove software, turn services on/off, map network resources, etc.).

That's a great start, but what I haven't been able to figure out how to script things like adding and configuring applets to the panels.

Re:Bugger

[blackest_k]

I do it with gparted
I have a usb hard drive with 3 operating systems windows 7 linux mint and av linux (debian 6.06)
booting with av i can put windows7 and mint on any system easily with gparted. The only quirk is windows7 always needs the destination partition increasing in size by 1mb.
once the o/s is on a quick chroot to the new linux partion then grub-install update-grub then reboot to the new linux install then update-grub again this gets rid of the usb installs being in the menu reboot this time choose windows loader boot to windows it then sets up any new drivers required. (if you don't wipe out the windows hidden system partition it stays registered)

The main advantage is i can prepare a single system fully update it and roll out as needed.
I can even create a virtual drive with virtualbox configure it as a dual boot configure it as needed and write that out to a physical usb drive and use it as the image to deploy. I generally resize the partitions to make them as small as possible then expand them if needed.
Once you have good base images you can customise them as required for each deployment.

What?

[ArcadeMan]

Users can also define a background color or a background picture no matter what greeter they are using.

I don't know what a "greeter" is supposed to be, but if being able to define a background color or a background picture is listed as a feature in 2014, it's not getting me interested in trying out Linux.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

A greeter is an old or mentally retarded person that Walmart positions by the store entrance whose job is ostensibly to greet patrons as the enter, but is really looking for people who may be trying to leave with merchandise they have not payed for. Not to be confused with a breeder, who is a non-homosexual person.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

If i try to understand what you are saying, i can only draw the opposite conclusion: if they are polishing, all the rest just works.

Disclaimer: as an (currently ex-) Mint user i find it one of the most user/desktop friendly distro's, and it's practically 100% compatible with ubuntu. I'm not saying 2014 is the year of linux on the desktop, since Mint is already around for a while.

Leaves me puzzling where your cynicism comes from.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its an added benefit to overspending on Apple products. Lifetime of sneering and cynicism towards those you deem as "lesser".

Re:What?

[ArcadeMan]

It's not cynicism, I'm really curious why background color/picture is being listed as a feature at all. It's one of the first few basic GUI items that should be working. It's like telling me that, at last, the pointer really follows your mouse movements or that USB flash drives are finally working properly.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Desktop backgrounds have worked since something like forever. This is a fix of some finer point concerning the display manager, its multiple selectable greeters (login screens), and selection of a background for said greeter.

Re:What?

[PrimaryConsult]

I haven't RTFA, but the 'greeter' is basically the login screen. I am guessing that certain non-default greeters caused issues with setting background pictures. As someone who usually logs in to tty1 and simply runs startx to get a GUI, I haven't much experience with or use for greeters...

Re:What?

[Blaskowicz]

It's about customizing the login window, simply by clicking around in a GUI. In the previous version, you can select between two variants baked by the devs.
Under Windows, you can't do anything about it (except perhaps enabling NT4-style login) and under OSX I don't know.

In older or other distros it would be a matter of editing /etc/xwurgdm/shitllist.conf to load a new WWTK theme with a modified XHTSGML file that points to /usr/share/pixmaps/242434/uglyflower.xpm instead of /usr/share/pixmaps/242434/nerdy_background.xpm

Re:What?

[stasike]

A greeter is called Login screen on MS Windows. How do you change the background or graphics style in Windows Login screen without third-party tools or using regedit? Can you change the software behind the Login screen to get different features?

Re:What?

[Blaskowicz]

a greeter (or a "thingdm") is good for auto-login, so I never see it except in rare circumstances like trying a random old window manager or really needing to log out (if ssh localhost doesn't cut it lol)
A shit one like slim or lxdm can be used if you care about precious footprint, with lightdm more modern but funnily a lot uglier when used raw.

I remember trying autogin on tty1 but it's semi-hackish and you have to google for it.
I think I'd like best to have both autologin on tty1 or tty1-4 and autologin on a graphical session.

Re:What?

[John.Banister]

You could be het & not be a breeder, like if you're a freemartin.

Re:What?

[jones_supa]

I don't know what a "greeter" is supposed to be, but if being able to define a background color or a background picture is listed as a feature in 2014, it's not getting me interested in trying out Linux.

I'm sorry that you are modded down, but I certainly agree. Configuring a pretty background for the greeter sounds like a neat feature and I am grateful for the guy(s) who programmed it in, but it boggles my mind why it is mentioned as a major feature of the release. We're really scraping the bottom of the barrel here.

Re:What?

[ArcadeMan]

And once again, my confusion comes from the habit of OSS developers to name things differently from everybody else just for the sake of being different. This is annoying and pointless.

Had the news been about "changing the background color/picture on the login screen", I would have understood immediately.

Re:What?

[chmod a x mojo]

The "feature" is just icing on the cake. It was always possible to change the greeter backgrounds... individually in each greeter settings file.

From the way it sounds in this press release you can set the background once in a centralized space and it will automatically change the background for you in the event you switch your greeter for any reason ( not a very common occurrence barring major bugs being introduced) , saving you the "hassle" of having to go through and set up the new greeter background.

In other words it's polish, not a new killer feature.

Re:What?

[Hognoxious]

You aren't curious, you're an imbecile.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or a DINK.

Gas Simulator

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this version of Mint come with any gas simulation software? This was promised *years* ago and has yet to materialise.

Re:Gas Simulator

[bluefoxlucid]

Yes, it is fully compatible with TacoBell.com.

Has MDM's power-sucking been improved

[ron_ivi]

The main feature improvment I'd like to see on MDM would be to suck less power when it's idle. Seems in a previous version it was constantly pounding on the CPU when idle. http://forums.linuxmint.com/vi...

Re:Has MDM's power-sucking been improved

[Blaskowicz]

It makes me think of xscreensaver, often included when you install lxde on a row ubuntu box.. The thing apparently sucks up 100% CPU on old computers by design. I call it the screenwaster, but it's pretty sometimes.

In general screen saver / screen blanking is often a very sad affair in linux! You never know where the "correct" way to set the time out (or time outs) is, power management or screensaver options?, and then the options seemingly conflict or I don't remember what was set. Today after waking up I saw the monitor had spent entire night not going blank.
A few years ago it was worse as I had two screensavers installed and I toggled between about 10 minutes and two hours (so it doesn't kick off when watching a long Flash video)

Re:Has MDM's power-sucking been improved

[Anonymous Coward]

It sucks when the screensaver kicks in mid-fap.

Re:Has MDM's power-sucking been improved

[jones_supa]

In general screen saver / screen blanking is often a very sad affair in linux! You never know where the "correct" way to set the time out (or time outs) is, power management or screensaver options?, and then the options seemingly conflict or I don't remember what was set. Today after waking up I saw the monitor had spent entire night not going blank.

This is exactly the stuff I mean when I talk about quality assurance problems in desktop Linux. The small glitches like this make me gnash my teeth.

Re:Has MDM's power-sucking been improved

[mister_playboy]

All movies playback programs I am familiar with have a "no screensaver while content is playing" setting, which is turned on by default.

Screensaver problems on Linux haven't been an issue I've seen in the last 5 years or so...

Re:Has MDM's power-sucking been improved

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using KDE since 2006 and never had these problems.

Updating?

[sremick]

I ditched Linux Mint as an option for my clients when I discovered that major updates required a complete, clean re-install. I switched to Xubuntu and have been perfectly happy. Since kicking Mint to the curb I haven't paid much close attention. Is this still the case with major version upgrades?

Re:Updating?

[Skarjak]

There is now a debian based "semi-rolling" release version. My understanding is that they package upgrades from Debian testing periodically. There is no reinstall needed.

Re:Updating?

[Blaskowicz]

They have just switched to Ubuntu LTS on the main editions. Well, Mint 13 is Ubuntu LTS already but this time they won't do versions based on 14.10, 15.04 etc. but will provide updates to the 14.04 based version in the form of Xorg, drivers etc. and certain software.
At worst the new model will be an optional reinstallation every couple years, with each major edition benefitting from Ubuntu's five-year term.

Re:Updating?

[Blaskowicz]

Except when there are little subtle "issues" which force a reinstallation anyway. We'll have to see if future big LMDE updates are trouble-less.

Re:Updating?

[rubycodez]

but you can do it, just not reccommended. I upgrade in place all the time. just point to new repositories and have at it. no big deal smoothing out any rough edges if you're a pretty good linux admin.

you'd of course make backup of client's system anyway, and have restored linux systems from backups successfully in the past?

Re:Updating?

[the_gadfly]

Yep. New version of Mint will be based on Ubuntu 14.04 until 2016, which is when new LTS versions of both Mint and Ubuntu are expected. Mint is saying it will make it "trivial" to update. I hope that's true.

Re:Updating?

[bluefoxlucid]

I have concluded that a rolling distro would be incredibly stupid.

What we need is something like Ubuntu, with its 6-12 month release cycle, but also supporting a rolling repository. Ubuntu has backports repository for select updates; a rolling repository would extend this, caveat only the latest version of all software and the non-rolling version of all software are supported. So Ubuntu 14.04 is supported, Ubuntu 14.04 rolling with today's updates is supported, but Ubuntu 14.04 with some middling release of Firefox from last week--fully stable, latest patched Firefox 29 when Firefox 30 just came out and is now in rolling--is *not* supported, at all.

The normal release could base on a rolling snapshot. I dunno.

Re:Updating?

[Threni]

Major updates? You mean from 13 LTS to 17 LTS or some specific package? You don't have to update anything if you don't want to, of course. I was happy with 13 and recently (this is old news, btw - 17 has been out a month or so) rebuilt a 17 just because it's just less hassle than twatting around trying to find PPAs which contain newer versions of vi, clang, git etc etc.

Re:Updating?

[rHBa]

With a separate /home partition it's easy. I installed Mint 17 (previously Mint 15) the other day (backed up /home anyway, just in case) and went with the custom install option (i.e choose your own partitions).

During the install I re-formatted my root (/) partition for the new version and selected my existing /home partition as the new /home mount point. When asked to create a user for the new install I entered my old username and password and my (ecryptfs encrypted) home folder was recognised and decrypted.

Finally I just had to re-install a few apps, my settings stored in ~/ were automatically recognised of course. Total time, <1hr.

Re:Updating?

[Hugonz]

No longer, since version 17, all upgrades will be over this LTS, at least until 2019.

Re:Updating?

[Hugonz]

I kicked Debian testing for LMDE and haven't looked back. Love semi rolling.

Re:Updating?

[ssam]

The ubuntu installer lets you install over the top of an existing install without need a seperate /home. As long as you don't tick the format box, it will only delete system directories and leave things like home. Mint is based on ubuntu, so it might work.

Re:Updating?

[Anonymous Coward]

You should check out OpenSUSE with its "tumbleweed" (rolling) repos. Sounds like exactly what you're looking for.

Bugger

[Anonymous Coward]

I only just installed Kubuntu 14.04 over the weekend. Can't be arsed to go through all that again.

Suks 4 U.

What was the point of this?

Is this a properly configured KDE distro?

[jones_supa]

When I used Fedora 20 KDE, installing updates was really weird. It worked, but the notification system was filled with a couple of weird gauges which never changed their state when the updates were installed. I was told in Slashdot that it is a distro that is not properly configured for KDE, which would mean that there were severe quality assurance problem. So is Linux Mint KDE properly configured and does the notification system make sense when installing updates?

Great!

[Watter]

KDE has always been my favorite environment. The consistency of things like hotkeys across apps and the ease with which they are changed is awesome. Dolphin and Konsole meet my file manager and terminal needs absolutely dead on and Linux Mint has been simplest to setup KDE distro for years. It's the only linux distro I can install and be 95% productive with after only about 10 minutes of customization - about 10 hotkey changes, and 5 app installations and I'm good to go.

Interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

I ditched Linux Mint as an option for my clients when I discovered that major updates required a complete, clean re-install.

I wouldn't have even noticed that, since I always do a complete clean reinstall for major updates anyway.

Avoiding incremental updates is the main reason why my systems don't turn into piles of bit-rotten cruft over time. It's also why I know where the backups are! Because users never put their stuff in sane places if they can find an insane place, and after you do a clean re-install you'll have to go find the stuff they were "permanently" storing in /var/tmp, or some random spool folder... which is when they get their lecture about using storage properly, and everybody ends up happy in the long run as the users get more knowledgeable and the data gets more intelligently placed.

I had to deal with a Centos system that had been "upgraded in place" repeatedly once... the data stores were all corrupt from accumulated hard drive errors and the users were flipping out, but since their backup regimen was no good they were just SOL.

Re:Interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

what ever happened to just mounting /home on a separate partition?

rubbish..

[Anonymous Coward]

Poppycock.

Just change your source.list ...

http://www.tecmint.com/upgrade-linux-mint-16-to-linux-mint-17/

2 seconds of google. I did this for 15 - 16 and then 16 -17.

you have clients? I assume therefore you are some 'consultant', I'd look for another career.

Best OS on the planet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Installed on my laptop from usb in like 5 mins start to surfing the web.
But I have been using Linux for the entire life of Linux.

This relese take way my entire hardriv by misktake

[planktonicme]

Fortunately it has nice Cinamon which I like with even AMD c-59 1 GHz with a simple netbook of chinese acer. But there doesn't fit Ubunut 14.04LTS, if freezes sometimes. I usesed vairiey of distributions without even have slightest clue what to do on that different OSs. But Linux has its common and draback Ubuntu 12.04 restricted some of my privilege to sing song, I solved it any way with the help of fourm in the canonical community. But, It's powerful than any of windows, but windows much more user friendly that's whay there is a balance between intellegent inside out fools outside, who think's Yes, I am in reality!

Hum, lets try crappy linux again

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed the latest OpenSuse stable release, tried to change the theme and kde crashed, I had to ctrl alt f2 to stop and restart the kde which worked. I installed all of the updates this time which took 45 minutes(fios) and then changed the theme and it worked no issue. But, you would never have an issue like this with win 7/8/8.1 even without the updates and service packs.

  All DE's that I have tried are unstable and just plain buggy. Linux distros and linux software are stitched together from smaller fragmented programs written by anonymous individuals which of course the end result is not good and what you get is Windows 98 Type buggy OS, of course there is no synergy between these unknown developers.

At least, with windows the software like gimp and blender are complete and don't need any other dependency when installing. If your internet is down and you need to redo your linux machine you are screwed. Linux distros and software are too damn fragmented and too internet dependent to make it run. Until there is a universal single api like win32(easy development and no dependency issue) to target and also with backward compatibility to a point of course, I won't be switching to Linux any time soon.