Athlon XP2600 @ 2000 mhz
MSI KT4V MS-6712 mobo (VIA chipset)
1Gb DDR Ram
3 internal IDE hard drives totaling 6 partitions, with XP and Opensuse 11 dualboot. 1 of the hard-drives was un-used.
1 external Lacie 500Gb USB2 drive
Liteon dual-layer DVD/RW
Creative Soundblaster Audigy with Live Drive front panel
floppy
Nvidia Gforce FX5600XT, DVI, VGA, SPdif
Viewsonic G220f 21" CRT connected to VGA port
LG Flatron L1953TR 19" LCD connected to DVI
Canyon CN-WCAM21 webcam
Winfast 2000 XP TV card
HP Deskjet 3550 printer
Canonscan Lide 25 USB scanner
Netgear NIC
VIA onboard LAN
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- Booting from live CD, Viewsonic monitor was out of range and displayed a bunch of rainbow colors. LG monitor showed perfectly @ 1280 x 1024 59hz.
- Clicked install from desktop. same experience, Install ran smoothly ignoring that. Selected the spare drive for installation (use entire disk).
- Once on the desktop, i received a task area Hardware bubble message about restricted drivers availablity for Nvidia. Anyway i followed the prompt and the download process began, but failed with a 404 "not found" error. Using Synaptic, I reloaded - this in itself was a troubleshooting step which Average Joe would not know anything about. I then tried again, and this time the drivers downloaded and installed successfully. A reboot was required after.
- After reboot, the Viewsonic monitor became the Primary monitor, and the LG was simply without signal. Went to Control Center and saw the new Nvidia X Server Settings icon, which i duly clicked, and started setting up the LG.
- My two monitors are usually configured as dual-view, with different resolutions on each and task bar and icons are only on the Primary monitor's desktop, and maximizing of windows happens only within each monitor's boundaries, not across both. I was unable to configure this arrangement in Mint.
- Updating Mint (generally) - i followed the "there are 124 available updates" bubble, and it started downloading as you'd expect, but during install it prompted for overwrite of various files seemingly random e.g. "shell.rc" etc but gave no explanation of what they were or what app was requesting it, so its almost impossible to know whether to accept or skip file overwrite. I took a guess and kept fingers crossed.
- Sound card is set up to use optical in from my cable digital tv, and then out through jack to RCA to my Hi-fi amp. Inital sound card settings didn't have optical enabled, but a double-click on the sound icon and a little clicking around, had my Live drive working within a couple of mins - much quicker than it would be in Windows.
- HP 3550 printer not found automatically. I had to add it manually via Control Center > printing. But it works perfectly now.
- Couldn't find any place to see if my TV card is detected
- Couldn't find any place to see if my webcam is detected
- Couldn't find any place to see if my scanner is detected
- Using Software Portal, i added aMSN as my preferred Messenger client, and subsequently discovered that both TV card and Webcam were detected after all, but there was no way to know that. I just followed a hunch that i may be able to find out from aMSN - suddenly dawned on me that i can stream TV using msn . Added Skype too, which IMO should also be i the Instant Messaging catergory
Notes, and suggestions according to listed numbers above:
1,4. There seems to be a behaviour problem here regarding which monitor Mint (and other distros) chooses as its primary. IMO this should be the most commonly used VGA port, as was activated by Nvidia drivers. Its not a show stopper, but what i experienced is a bit weird and can potentially damage monitors.
3. It seems clear that a repo update should be either forced, or suggested by Mint before the download is attempted. Alternatively (and probably best in long run) is that the 404 message either instructs the user to try reloading via synaptic, and then trying again, or provides a button right there so the user can reload.
5. Is this a failing of Nvidia drivers? Nvidias windows drivers will allow me the configuration i need, so i would expect that to happen in Linux too... Probably not Mint's problem. I have had similar problems in OpenSuse, but was able to get around it by installing the Nvidia drivers, then using X11 to configure (rather than Nvidia's own interface). Mint doesn't have and X11 config in Control center, so this is not possible, and could in fact be a show stopper for me even.
6. This could be improved easily with a little extra explanation.
8. Not a big deal, but surprising because other distros had detected it and prompted me to configure it.
9. Not a common piece of hardware these days and to be honest i don't really use it, but it is in my pc and therefore should be somewhere in Control Center. amsn is not the right place to discover your hardware is installed.
10. Should also be in Control Center. amsn is not the right place to discover your hardware is installed.
11. Can't find anything relating to scanners in Control Center - scanners are commonplace, so i feel strongly that some assistance should be given to getting them working. Its a Show Stopper if I'm without my scanner. Like with the printer, other distros have detected it and prompted me to configure it.
In summary:
system is very useable, except there's nowhere to configure a scanner and i can't get the dual monitors configured how i want.