Linux Mint 5 Elyssa XFCE CE RC1 (BETA 025) is out!

[mickel]

I am a Mint KDE user but I also like to try new things. I tried the Gnome Elyssa three different times but had problems of puzzle like pieces coming off the screen image where I clicked the screen. I didn't know how to fix it so I went back to Daryna KDE.
I installed this one and have been working on it for a couple of days now and boy is it a winner! So far everything works great right out out of the box. I can see why XFCE people like it, its fast, clean and smooth. Since I am old and dumb and don't know how to do terminals I like my Linux to be smart and sophisticated yet easy. Now one of the best things about all
Mint flavors and editions is that when you install it on one of your partitions it doesn't erase your boot log so you can't find your other distros. This is a big deal when you don't know how to fix it yourself and besides , my hard drive is approaching the maximum number of formats. Thanks for another great one!

[oliverjames]

OK, Couldn't wait, did a fresh install over old XFCE root and home partitions.

Install went smoothly. The overall impression is good. Powersaving appears to be working OK (at least fan is silent). The machine, Acer 4052, came out of Hibernation OK this morning although no password was required?

The biggest glich so far is that my other partitions, Mint Gnome and Fat32, are not being mounted as normal. This generally happens automatically. Invoking Gparted gives message "to mount 3G volume, org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mont-fixed auth_admin_keep_always <--(actio, result)."

Glitch re the tray icon for power source (similar to that found with Gnome version) With XFCE the system correctly reports charging from AC but shows battery icon.

Congratulations to all for the good work, Once the partition mount glitch solved this will become my main Mint distro.

[Husse]

my hard drive is approaching the maximum number of formats.

There is no such thing - formatting does not differ from any other use

[oliverjames]

The automount is gone from xubuntu as well and I think it's a stupid thing to do.
I thought the automount was just a problem with usb installs but it was changed for both....One way is to open Partition editor with a root thunar open, to get them to mount.
Then use the entries in /etc/mtab for /etc/fstab

Automount usb is working for me. I've modified the fstab to mount other partitions. Full functionality restored.

Hard to understand why the decision was taken to stop this happening automatically.

[anthony2010]

Its visually stunning, its faster than ever, it comes fully loaded with useful software and is generally the best OS Ive ever seen. Unfortunateley as is the tradition of ubuntu and mint to date, I started with sound then lost it after an update.

However, the OS is that good I want to stick with it and iron out any niggly bits gradually.

[titto]

Welcome to Mint titto
You may have to install proper drivers - let EnvyNG have a go at it

There's no needing of Envy: the only driver that supports my card is the open source one (radeon).
Anyway, after playing a bit with xorg & compiz-check, I discovered that my card was blacklisted by Ubuntu Hardy to prevent compiz to work.

[Insane1]

Hi all! So far the rest of my testing of XFCE has been very nice. Compiz runs extremely nicely. But I have found two problems my Acer TM4670 experiences.
Sometimes when I move my mouse to come back from screensaver, the screensaver seems to freeze, and I have to restart X to escape from it. I have also found that PiTiVi causes a sudden logoff when I attempt to launch it. I would post the details of the terminal when trying to launch, but I'm unsure of how to get terminal output when X crashes (I believe that is what was crashing) from the launch.

EDIT: I've found that full screening flash does the same thing as the screen saver, it sometimes seems to freeze if you hit close fullscreen for flash....and it's like there's a still image of the flash when you closed it taking up the screen. I managed to fix it by guessing where the firefox window the flash was in was and closing it. I believe it might actually be a problem with the new ati drivers, but I'm not 100% certain.

EDIT 2: Turns out the problems (well except PiTiVi) were indeed the 8.6 ATI drivers. I've heard that some other cards have the same problems as mine concerning the new drivers. Issues where remedied by using the restricted driver manager and OpenGL video output (Well at least until the 8.7 drivers come out through envy. )

[oliverjames]

I'm still overawed by the speed and efficiency of this desktop (with great multimedia capacities).

Apart from the battery icon problem with the gnome power manager (not behaving well on my ACER 4052) and the lack of auto-access to other partitions on my HD:

Can anyone tell me how to access the shared directory via a windows workgroup. I've just uninstalled fusesmbtool, not responding, not connecting.

I ran as su the following script:
smbmount \\\\192.168.1.138\\Compaq /mnt/mountpoint -o username=richard
and having done the aptget thing to install the necessary samba packages I can access the partition on my old W2000 box. This is sitting in a cupboard somewhere with printer, scanner, UPS, adsl and networking stuff to get noise and stuff out of my office and essentially acts as a scanner interface.

But it would be nice to access this as user not root. It would also be quicker if I could do this with one click (or maybe 2 to allow pwd entry).

Another question, having installed xtightvncviewer to access this box I find Remote desktop viewer. Works nicely. Can I uninstall the vnc derivative or is it needed for this included package?

Any help greatly appreciated.

Phenomenal MINT XFCE installation. Well done. I fell in love with XFCE on my former Zenwalk OS. Nice also but Mint is a more polished for someone who doesn't have time to do lots of tweaking.

[borgio3]

Hello everyone,
i'm Giorgio Beltrammi (aka borgio3) from Italy.
I downloaded the new Beta release of Linux Mint Xfce and i tried them in live session only. I'm waiting the stable to install them on my BenQ laptop.
This release is very nice, powerfull, easy and simple to all users and i wrote a review (in italian language only) for my website.

http://livelinux.altervista.org/article ... =it&pg=769

Thanks for this magnificient piece of software.

Ciao Ciao

[merlwiz79]

Hello everyone,
i'm Giorgio Beltrammi (aka borgio3) from Italy.
I downloaded the new Beta release of Linux Mint Xfce and i tried them in live session only. I'm waiting the stable to install them on my BenQ laptop.
This release is very nice, powerfull, easy and simple to all users and i wrote a review (in italian language only) for my website.

http://livelinux.altervista.org/article ... =it&pg=769

Thanks for this magnificient piece of software.

Ciao Ciao

Nice Review.
If you don't like the border around the Desktop icons you can remove it with mintDesktop.
I am glad you liked we as a team have done to XFCE CE.
I think you are the 1st to review this edition.

I used google to translate the review and understood pretty much all of it.
http://66.102.9.104/translate_c?hl=en&sl=it&tl=en&u=http://livelinux.altervista.org/articles.php%3Flng%3Dit%26pg%3D769&usg=ALkJrhggTq0FOlrGlLDQqO38rHTPLfDe0A

[flowheat]

I was really looking forward to trying the new XFCE version, but when I run the liveCD and I attempt to run the Install program on the desktop the hard drive light starts flickering but nothing seems to happen.

[belovedmonster]

The biggest glich so far is that my other partitions, Mint Gnome and Fat32, are not being mounted as normal. This generally happens automatically. Invoking Gparted gives message "to mount 3G volume, org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mont-fixed auth_admin_keep_always <--(actio, result).

I've got the same bug in my Xubuntu installation! No one has yet replied to any of my several posts about it on the Ubuntu forums. This bug is the bane of my life! Though I don't think I came across it on the Mint beta. I'm not on that computer at the moment so I can't double check.

[vmeiste]

Hi all,

Installed Mint 5 Elyssa XFCE RC1 on my Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop last night and it is working great so far. No problems on the install and no usability problems so far. I am using Compiz and that is working fine also. Great job!

[silverfox]

Download and install were flawless. Great work guys. One happy XFCE camper

checksum & burn were fine, but install drops to "busybox" prompt

I had that happen before. I added the options all-generic-ide irqpoll=on and it worked fine after that.

I assume you add these options at the prompt when booting? Do you do it for the live CD prior to install, or after the install is done when the HD is booting? Do you have to do it every time? Is there a way to have that as a perm option?

[Lolo Uila]

I'm testing it out on an old P3 1GHz system with a Matrox G400 Max video card, and the fonts and text for the XFCE desktop, icons, dialogs and menus is really, really tiny. I can hardly read anything on a 19 inch monitor at only 1024x768 resolution! Firefox is fine, but anything with a desktop generated dialog (like Brasero) has the same problem.

I did not have this problem with Elyssa main (Gnome).

384K MP3 file shows in Exaile music player, but locks it up tight when it tried to play it (have to kill the process). Rhythm Box didn't show 384K files in the list (I assume that means it couldn't play them either, but at least it didn't try, and lock up as a result).

And the system volume control does nothing. Same problem in Gnome version. Volume in applications seems to work.

Download, burn and install went smoothly, and it does seem snappier than the Gnome version on this old system with only 512MB of RAM.

[Steely]

Overall the beta is working great. Applied all updates for levels 1 through 3 today and have 1 zombie process ( even after restart and full shutdown ). The zombie process shows when using top from the terminal and as can be expected the kill -9 with the pid cannot find the process. When running idle the cpu will spike to 15 to 20 % every 5 to 10 seconds.

Dale

Just did a clean install to see if the problem originated before the updates and ran ps aux

root 7944 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? Z 15:21 0:00 [sh] <defunct>

Update :

Using the ps -Af command I was able to determine the child process ( zombie ) parent ppid belongs to /usr/bin/python /opt/wicd/daemon

[darthchaosofrspw]

Also, I'm sure it's too late to change this now, but why is Exaile the default music player? It's known to be a system hog compared to Rhythmbox when using large music libraries. And even if it wasn't, a consistent approach with the same apps as the main distro (where possible) is the best way to go!

I know. I prefer Rhythmbox too, so as soon as I installed the OS, I removed Exaile and Gnormalize and installed Rhythmbox and Sound Juicer in their places, and I replaced OpenOffice.org with AbiWord and Gnumeric. And I couldn't get YouTube videos to play well in Firefox, so I downloaded the Flash Player plugin from Adobe and installed it (sudo ./flashplayer-installer). Plus, since I dual-boot with WinXP (I keep WinXP so I can use WinDVR 3...I like WinDVR 3 better than MythTV and Freevo), I installed ntfs-config so I can mount my Windows partition and make it readable and writable. Plus, I wanted a firewall so I installed Firestarter. It's great as well.

[darthchaosofrspw]

Linux Mint 5 XFCE Community Edition RC1 (BETA 025) is out and available for download. We're planning to release the stable version of this edition in two weeks so I hope you'll be numerous to test it and we'll receive plenty of feedback.

Please find all relevant information about this release at this address: http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_elyssa_xfce.php

I'd also like to thank and congratulate Merlwiz79 for maintaining this edition and for making it better and better with each release.

Have fun with it and don't forget to give us feedback by replying to this thread.

Clem.

Been using it since yesterday. This is an awesome release. I like this even better than Xubuntu 8.04.1. Well done!

[darthchaosofrspw]

I put a video of Mint 5 Xfce on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeXmq4rMw7U

[Lolo Uila]

Okay, I just found something horribly annoying. I went to delete a bunch of backup files from an external HDD and it took 10 minutes to "move" the files to the trash. confused?

I didn't even want them in the trash, I just wanted them gone, so I right-clicked on them and selected delete, but I had to wait 10 minutes, and then empty the trash.

Under Gnome I can right-click on folders or files and select "Delete" and they just go away without moving them or putting them in the trash. This SERIOUSLY needs to be added to XFCE!! (Please?)