Linux Mint 12 "Lisa" RC released!

[Artichoke]

I haven't been able to get far running the RC from the DVD so I'm installing VirtualBox and installing it there. I'm looking forward to trying MATE; from the YouTube video posted above it looks like it might be just the ticket for we change-resistant individuals who wish to cling to our finely tuned Gnome 2 environments. I'll report back, and Clem, I'll swallow my words if I need to.

[chdslv]

I liked the Gnome 3 from its inception. Gnome 2 reminded me of Windows, not that Gnome 2 was bad. I like the way Gnome 3 was done by Mint. Can I autohide the bottom panel? It would be nice to have both panels on autohiding.

http://www.webupd8.org/2011/11/autohide ... nally.html as posted earlier doesn't open.
Edit; It opens now.

Only question is how to autohide the bottom panel.

[The Recorder]

Working OK... Where do you add a keyboard layout. In 11 you can do this without adding language files. In 12, you can't, and adding a language becomes a complicated issue with ibus.

Sorry, my bad... Found everything.

[MyWorld]

What do you mean you cannot customize the layout? I'm not asking provocatively, just curious. Gnome Shell is relatively customizable, you just have to learn the new ways of customizing since it's a new environment.

And this has probably been said a thousand times in here already, but Gnome 2 is dead, gone, finished, discontinued. Mint moved to Gnome 3 because staying with Gnome 2 is not an option, or at best a very temporary option. And it was out of Mint's hands, they don't develop Gnome.

I see that now, and having spend a couple of hours hunting down shell extensions I still have this unhappiness in me. I have multiple PC's to maintain, this is no pleasure with the current situation of installing extensions.

I have no choice but to remove Gnome from all the PC's in the near future, the changes are just too drastic and I do not have the time to support the radical new design. It seems like I'll have to migrate them all over to KDE.

Yes, Gnome 2 is dead and gone, so it is time to move on, again.

I'm just a very sad panda that something perfect (Gnome 2) now lays at the wayside in the interest of "progress" (Gnome 3). It was inevitable that Mint should follow suit, unless they changed their main DE in favour of something else, but what? I'll just hang on till the LXDE release (if there is going to be one - hopefully) or till the support for Mint 11 runs out before making my final decision.

[bimsebasse]

Have you tried logging into a MATE session? That might be the way forward for you and those who share your frustrations about Gnome Shell. It looks and works almost exactly like classic Gnome.

[MyWorld]

I'll give MATE a go on one of the PC's and see how it goes with that user.

I just hope Mint supports MATE for a while to come and don't drop it in future releases.

[KBD47]

I'll give MATE a go on one of the PC's and see how it goes with that user.

I just hope Mint supports MATE for a while to come and don't drop it in future releases.

You could also let them try Gnome Classic, and perhaps MGSE with the bottom panel disabled under advanced settings. The latter gives a sort of hybrid panel that reminds me a bit of Ubuntu pre-Unity with only the top panel. I think that setup might be a bit less confusing to new users. Just a thought.

[wei2912]

I tried CD no codecs 64bit on Lenovo laptop T500 with ATI Radeon HD mobility 3650/Intel mobility something something
*Can't extract .Rar files. Says unsupported file.
I tried with custom app downloaded via package manager, still doesn't work.
*Theres no boot animation..I've never tried an RC by linux but it might right but for me, it's just super-ugly.
*The system is about 50% slower than version 10. I did not use 11 because it's full of bugs.
*Gnome 3 is ugly, very stripped, and quite slow and buggy...
I know this is an RC but it's not possible to use even for test purpose.

Gnome 3 is still rather buggy, but the Linux Mint team might be able to fix them. Also, the boot animation has been removed to make bootup faster.

[wei2912]

I liked the Gnome 3 from its inception. Gnome 2 reminded me of Windows, not that Gnome 2 was bad. I like the way Gnome 3 was done by Mint. Can I autohide the bottom panel? It would be nice to have both panels on autohiding.

http://www.webupd8.org/2011/11/autohide ... nally.html as posted earlier doesn't open.
Edit; It opens now.

Only question is how to autohide the bottom panel.

Agree. There might be an extension somewhere on the Internet.

[aelfinn]

It is not the job of moderators to interpret what is and isn't a bug, nor for that matter to monitor a particular thread.

Well, that was very helpful. To be a little clearer: what is or isn’t the job of a moderator depends on what you tell the moderator to do. If you tell one person to monitor a thread for things that people on the thread agree looks like a bug and make that person responsible for entering relevant details into the correct form on your bug tracking site, then that is what that person’s job is. As I said: if you take finding bugs seriously and set store by high-quality bug reports, then this is something you should be willing to do.

Joe Random User will often not be sure whether what he sees is a bug

This is exactly why it "should" be reported as such rather than Joe Random User asking for a solution here.

Again: the thread would be for ascertaining what is likely to be a bug and what isn’t and for making sure that likely bugs get reported properly by somebody who knows exactly how to report bugs.

[W8DIZ]

Been running Mint since version 3.
The new versions, starting with versions 10 and 11 started becoming less "friendly" ( from a users viewpoint, not a techie).
Version 12 smacks of Windows "Vista"; think I'll wait for version 13? lucky number
I can never understand the geek attitude that we must always break something that is not broken, by coming up with "new and better versions".

[chdslv]

Actually, the top panel looks half as wide as in a normal Gnome 3 desktop, and the bottom panel the other half in width, so it doesn't really take extra space as in a normal Gnome3 DE. This Mint setup looks like Gnome3 on the top and Gnome2 at the bottom.

You can add only 13 applications to favourites in Mint12 in Gnome3 window, but the bottom panel menu becomes longer and goes over the top, but not like in the Windows 7. You won't get to use the menu at all from the bottom panel, if you add 2 more apps.

The maximum amount of apps in the favourites in the Gnome3 window is 17, after that the ones that goes down won't be reachable. In Unity you can go on adding and opening any amount of apps. The left side bar just goes up and down.

Note: my laptop screen is 1366x768

Maybe this can be looked into.

[jmak]

I liked the Gnome 3 from its inception. Gnome 2 reminded me of Windows, not that Gnome 2 was bad. I like the way Gnome 3 was done by Mint. Can I autohide the bottom panel? It would be nice to have both panels on autohiding.

http://www.webupd8.org/2011/11/autohide ... nally.html as posted earlier doesn't open.
Edit; It opens now.

Only question is how to autohide the bottom panel.

Me too. Gnome 2, looks so archaic after using gnome 3 for a while, also on archlinux.

After isntalling mint 12RC, the fist thing I did, disabled the bottom panel. I don't need it. Now, I have a pure gnome 3 setup and I love it. So far, I haven't experienced any instability with the release candidate, other than those mentioned in the release notes.

[phishsauce]

I am also in the "Love Gnome 3" camp. I disabled the bottom bar and the msge-menu extension as well and have been using the pure Gnome 3 way since last Thursday.

I had a few installation issues however. First off, I installed off a USB key and I initially used unetbootin to create the bootable USB, however it seemed to fail to boot. I ran into this issue with Mint 11 as well and also Mint 10. I never actually ended up using Mint 11 because I read it wasn't very stable, and there was little difference (for what I use the system for) between 10 and 11 anyway. Anyhow, I don't remember how I got mint 10 to install from usb / unetbootin, but it was deep in the threads of some fedora board that had a work around.

Installing Mint 12 tho, I tried using the USB Creator that comes with Mint. This worked a bit better, however I still got an error message when booting that said 'vesamenu.c32:not a COM32R image' and a prompt. I got around this easily by following this http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=59585 (just type live and hit enter).

Mint 12 then booted normally and I proceeded to install the OS. No issues occurred along the way. There was an issue with the wireless driver so I stayed plugged into an ethernet cable and power and it installed and downloaded various this, and it all took about 5 or 10 minutes.

To get around the wireless issue, I had read a thread about a new wireless driver being shipped with the latest ubuntu (brcm80211 / brcmsmac). This was enabled on my system but for some reason not active. (You can find if its enabled by running 'lsmod | grep ^brc' in the shell). On my system in particular there was also 'acer-wmi' enabled. I'm not sure exactly what this is for, but I don't have an acer, and I read another thread somewhere about disabling this. So 'sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf' and add blacklist acer-wmi to the bottom this file, restart and I'm on the couch and wireless.

At this point after tweaking the gnome-tweaks menu and a few keyboard config changes, my laptop is now just about back to where I was with Mint 10. I've got my VMs running, various gedit plugins in for coding, chrome and chromium installed, ssh keys, terminal looking pretty. It's great.

I've noticed a few issues with suspend / resume. It seems to not work actually, if I close my laptop lid or let it sit for so long (long enough to go into suspension) the screen just goes blank and about 50% of the time in which it does not come back I will get a cursor that moves around but doesnt do anything, and sometimes I see the log in screen but without the login box (just the background and the clock). I don't have much information about why this happens.. my swap is just under four gigs.. I may try doubling or tripling that since I have the disk space.

I am really excited to see that gnome shell extensions seem to be javascript / css based. I am even more excited to see all the msge extensions on github and that there are extensions being made for all sorts of things. I think we'll be seeing a lot of ecosystem growth in the Gnome world.

To those of you who complain, you can't expect everything served to you on a silver platter. Linux Mint 12 is the best distro with Gnome 3 I have tried. Ubuntu's Unity seemed incomplete and was not as smooth, and opensuse 12 wasn't to par either. It seemed taken over and had none of its own spice integrated with Gnome 3. Mint is. If you don't like it, give it some time to grow. Gnome 3 is a huge release and heading in the right direction in terms of OS evolution and it is very new so there is still lots of extension work to be done to get it all the way there.

There is nothing wrong with mint 10 or 11, and there its not like you are going to be hung out to dry if you don't upgrade. I still receive package updates regularly for Mint 10 (my work pc) and there is really no reason that I would need to upgrade this machine for the next year or two for sure. Although I am probably going to upgrade when mint 12 hits full release.

[chdslv]

[/quote] Me too. Gnome 2, looks so archaic after using gnome 3 for a while, also on archlinux.

After isntalling mint 12RC, the fist thing I did, disabled the bottom panel. I don't need it. Now, I have a pure gnome 3 setup and I love it. So far, I haven't experienced any instability with the release candidate, other than those mentioned in the release notes.[/quote]

How did you disable the bottom panel?

[Holy Diver]

I have installed Mint 12 RC1 in my PC. All what I need works properly. But I am not able to run MATE. After selecting "MATE" as my session and infilling username and password at the loggin screen nothing turns up. Logging screen clears off only and appears in few seconds empty again .
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Few minutes ago I have updated mate-session-manager and now all is in order.

[phishsauce]

If you go to the mint menu and type "Advanced" you could see Advanced Settings come up. Go into here and look through the options for "Bottom panel" and uncheck it. It should go away as soon as you uncheck that and msge-menu should move up to the top. I disabled that as well since its somewhat redundant to have it and the Gnome 3 "start menu / application switcher" running.

[bimsebasse]

How did you disable the bottom panel?

Launch Advanced Settings, under "Shell Extensions" turn off "Bottom Panel Extension" and "Window List Extension". If the panel doesn't disappear immediately, log out and in again to see the effect.

Me too. Gnome 2, looks so archaic after using gnome 3 for a while, also on archlinux.

After a month on Gnome Shell and more months on Unity before that, logging into a classic session or MATE feels like a trip back to a distant and inconvenient past, and I had no problem with Gnome 2 at all half a year ago.

[chdslv]

I've noticed a few issues with suspend / resume. It seems to not work actually, if I close my laptop lid or let it sit for so long (long enough to go into suspension) the screen just goes blank and about 50% of the time in which it does not come back I will get a cursor that moves around but doesnt do anything...

Yes, it doesn't suspend correctly, meaning the resuming from suspension is quite bad, what I get is screen with both panels full of snow and without any words. Something has to be done on this, and I'm sure it will be done.

I have Fedora Verne and there is no problem at all in suspend/resume. Mint is better is reaction to commands than Fedora Verne. Mint12 has too many apps, while Verne has very less, making it easy for me to install only the apps I need. I had to install NVidia driver to both distros anyway.

I am also not quite happy with the square icons, which doesn't tell me the name of the application. Of course, I know by the time the full Mint12 comes, it would be superb.

Thanks!

[VanR]

Installed Mint 12. Updated. Fooled around with the MGSE for a while. Switched over to MATE and I'm happy. Seems quite usable to me. Good job. I'm sure things will only get better as the team polishes up a little.