Hello from Cornwall, uk -my story so far

[benlawlor85]

Hi all,
Here is my story.
I have been a longtime mac user, and general apple fan for many years, i had tried ubuntu many years ago but found the learning curve too steep. About 18months ago my aging G5 mac died! So i built a hackintosh. Which worked great and enabled me to use my much beloved iTunes, iPhoto, Aperture, Photoshop etc. But the hack started to annoy me updates were a massive deal taking hours of research to see how to do it. Though the help over at Tonymacx86 is great. So a few weeks ago i tried Ubuntu 12.04. Which was just wow so much better than the Ububtu i tried years ago.
This got me thinking could i really change from Apple - a company which i once loved who i was getting more frustrated with. no PPC support, dot mac ruined into mobile me, and that runnier into icloud, they try and force you to buy new hardware and the latest software too. But i would never go to the darkside, so there was one option Linux. but what about 'my' core apps.
This list was basically as follows,
iTunes- very important must work with andorid too hopefully better than itunes acutely does.
iPhoto- i have a large iphoto library which i would like to keep and not to re-catalogue.
Aperture- after many years at college studying photography i rarely take pics these days but i do like aperture and use it sometimes. (i need a Raw workflow)
Chrome- love or hate google but chrome is great love how it syncs and the whole syncing with android is great too
Photoshop- i hate it its an awful program but i use it for work and having a copy at home can be useful.

So thats what i needed.
I tried out Ubuntu, which was nice. I really liked several features one being the new software centre, very apple app store and some of the apps i wanted to replace seemed to have good alternatives. There was a niggle tho, unity annoyed me and then i would get these crashes that closed all apps and the login screen would appear. This turned out to be a graphics card issue. I played around with various settings but got bored.... i like to tinker, but i like an OS to just work- hence the fear of the darkside.
i was on the verge of going back to OSX and indeed that became my default OS for a few more weeks. I came across mint, but damn its 800mb... and i didnt have any DVDs at home. So again i went back to OSX watching videos of mint on youtube! yes i am THAT cool.

Finally i installed Mint 13 64bit Cinamon!
First thoughts. This is kinda like windows... Yuck-lol
Second thoughts this actually looks great.
Fianly thought, Can this replace OSX?

More to come.

[benlawlor85]

Now when i say installed Mint i mean ran it from LiveCD.
My first install was a mess. You see my comp has about 4 HDDs which has my OSX boot drive with chimera on it (remember its a hack) a copy of the OSX boot drive essential when u have a hack, a 1tb file drive and a copy of that file drive. I chucked in a old 80gb drive when i installed Ubuntu. but never messed around with chimera so i would have to f12 on start up and select the drive. no biggy really.
My first time trying to install Mint failed, it installed but then failed to install Grub. and thus i couldnt boot into it. After some Googling or Wikioogling as i call it- a mixture of checking wikkis and googling. I found out that the drive should be ext3 not ext4. ok sorted.
So last night i started to install again. as did my other half installing it on am old macbook. (more about that another time)
Install went well. created the SWAP partition etc.
So there i am back to the same environment i was with the live CD, ok i have to press f12 to boot into but big deal.

Now for the deal makers or possibly breakers.
I WANT MUSIC. The BANSHEE Story
a few days before i had deleted my back-up file drive formatted it as... FAT i think and copied over my itunes music to it. I found this the easiest way as every other way i had problems with permissions. These were problems i had with ubuntu. So if you have problems with permissions when copying music copy it to a FAT drive and they disapear, far easier than using nautilus etc - well it was easier for me!

After a little wikioogling i managed to copy over my itunes xml file, but it didnt work. upon opening the xml i could see why, the path to each file was set to path i used in OSX. so a simple find and replace would sort that. So now there i am with Banshee, and all my music and play lists. And you know what its BETTER THAN iTUNES! it really is! the play queue Oh my good i have wanted that for itunes forever! and the small pane with the artists great and not genre pane which i never used anyway. and all the album covers apeared soon after, and the meta data cleaner thing no more duplicated artists! A couple songs i bought on itunes many years ago had DRM so didnt play! but transmission helped me with that. A couple problems were the uk Amazon mp3 store didnt work, not a big deal and i haven't researched it yet.

Obviously before all this i downloaded Chrome.
Which works, but wont work with full screen youtube with the default flash, you can disable it so it uses the old version but you get the message out of date flash with every flash video. not a biggy and ill look into it
Now to come i have:
Darktable which is a good Aperture replacement,
Gthumb, Shotwell etc as iPhoto replacements,
Photoshop, well thats easy GIMP

So in short i think im getting somewhere, there are a couple of possible deal breakers to come mainly the iPhoto alternative and more importantly how to get the stuff into it. but im sure with some help and time i can work it out.

Sorry for the two long boring posts.
But i hope it helps some people who are considering Linux.

Cheers for now.
Ben

[The-Wizard]

Welcome to the Mint family forums
wizard

[xenopeek]

Hi Ben, welcome to the Linux Mint forums Thanks for joining the forums! That is quite an undertaking, finding Linux alternatives to your favourite OSX programs and importing your existing files. It's actually a good read, so I hope you at least update us with the final result of your adventure into Linux

Be sure also to check out the Community website (tutorials, hardware and software reviews, ideas), and the Cinnamon Spices website for adding even more themes, applets and extensions to Cinnamon.

You can also chat in real-time with other Linux Mint users. In the Mint Menu, in the Internet section, start the application XChat IRC. You will automatically get connected to #linuxmint-chat for general chat and #linuxmint-help for support with other Linux Mint users.

Have fun with Linux Mint

[benlawlor85]

Hi Vincent,
Thanks for your reply.
I think the transition to Linux from another OS be it OSX or MS, is the biggest reason people stay using the other systems. I don't know how any apple user can be happy with the recent apple changes and as for MS well its always been awful. What is needed is easy to follow tutorials not only how to use the new apps but how to import your data and how they compare to Linux alternatives. Banshee is great yes i had a F*&k i hate you moment earlier but its all sorted now. Obviously how to vids are good but useless if u cant get your data across. I have to say Banshee is really good poss better than itunes.

All this said i would like to point out im not a clueless OSX user, i have been a system admin for a OSX server i installed in a school a few years ago and also do some IT work on various peoples macs and PCs, nothing serious. but i know the basics more than many.

Anyway i am going to try and both document how i have made the change and how to do it. I am also dragging my other half along to Mint she was on a PPC G4 laptop but now on an old macbook, so ill have that to post aswell. The more interest showed the more ill post! we all know how easy it is it loose interest.

Last point my comp will eventually be used as HTPC aswell fingers crossed HDMI works so i can use XBMC.

Cheers for now!

Ben

[benlawlor85]

Just an update, have had some very frustrating moments, first was no obvious way to auto mount a partition, worked that out - by using Storage device manager. But then i ended up with root owning the volume, so i couldn't edit or add any files to it. not very useful. It was a FAT partition so i finally worked out that u can get storage device manager to but a UID as root so that worked.
In doing all this i assumed that using a EXT3 partition would be better so used Gparted to create one but this was also owned by root, easy i thought i can do same as before! but no... no option for that on an EXT3 partition, so i had to use sudo chown when i finally worked out how to use it. My biggest annoyance was that in OSX u can change ownership by just going into "get info" authrorize as admin and then chaneg the owner, in fact the window looks so similar to the one in mint but there is no option for this. Im starting to think Linux will never be 100% user friendly.
I then installed the proprietary driver for my 9800GT thinking it would be better, and it seemed fine. Then banshee started to jump during playback. i assumed this was a banshee problem. but then when watching some online videos, the comp crashed and i was back to login screen, so i have gone back to the default drivers and it all seems fine now.

Still haven't tackled any of my other things maybe when i have some sparetime!

More updates soon.

Ben

[setcho]

with regard to the Chrome flash not going fullscreen issue I have the same problem and replied to a post I found in the LMDE forum, see herehttp://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=190&t=107065&p=607576#p607576

I still haven't found a fix and if you find one please post it. Cheers

[setcho]

I spoke too soon, I have fixed it! A closer reading of the askubuntu answer here http://askubuntu.com/questions/157437/videos-wont-go-into-full-screen was what I needed.

We need to switch Chrome to flash 11.2. However because we are using Linux Mint, flash version 11.2 isn't installed only 11.0.1 is. What you need to do is remove mint-flashplugin-11 from synaptic and install flashplugin-installer (i.e. 11.2) and then do the following

1. In the URL bar enter chrome://plugins/
2. Locate the Flash plug-in, you should see multiple versions listed
3. Click Disable for the plug-in with the location /opt/google/chrome/PepperFlash/libpepflashplayer.so (11.3)
4. You should still have one enabled in another location, like /usr/lib/adobe-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so (11.2)
5. Restart Chrome (quit and open again)

Hope this helps.

[benlawlor85]

Cheers much appreciated!
Works a treat.

Now to get banshee to work without jumping mid song...

Ben

[benlawlor85]

So Banshee is working pretty well now, as a plus music i burn to CD plays in the car, itunes never managed that....
and i have full screen flash in Chrome, tho i am getting annoyed at chrome, might change to firefox.

Last night i decided i wanted a game or two, i had tried getting RTCW ET working before but to no avail, so i installed Urban Terror instead. But didnt really like it. So i spent a few hours last night messing with ET to get it working, and finally it worked. Running in 32bit emu mode, but i have sound! may do a lil write up on this if anyone is interested.

Cheers
Ben

[iain_j]

Hi Ben, welcome aboard!

I've recently moved to Cinnamon, only used Windows previously. As far as photo organisers, I recommend digikam - it's KDE, but it installs perfectly fine on my Cinnamon setup. I tried Shotwell first of all and wasn't impressed, digikam is more sophisticated. I'll throw Gimp in there as well as a Photoshop replacement.

As an aside, digikam was a big reason for me to leave Windows. Never been satisfied with the free photo organisers available on Windows, I was considering shelling out for something like Lightroom but it's a lot of money for hobby use. I read good things about digikam so I downloaded the Windows version but could never get it working.

[benlawlor85]

hi,
starting using shotwell last night. it seems ok not quite iPhoto tho, might give digikam a go. Does installing a KDE app on Gnome not cause any problems at all?
Good to hear u have left the darkside! im very happy with Mint, even have my beloved Enemy Territory working!
I have had a couple of crashes tho, which i didn't expect coming from mac OS even tho it was a Hack. i very rarely had any stability issues. If they continue i may have to try anothing distro. Ubuntu is out tho as it doesn't work with my graphics card. and unity is not best.

[xenopeek]

You can use KDE applications with Gnome (MATE or Cinnamon) and vice versa. It will install some additional system libraries, and it may look a bit different from other applications sometimes. But is should work fine. KDE can also be quiet beautiful and nice to work with

[Rudemeister]

Hi, Ben. I went from Windows to a Hackintosh also. I too experienced the same problems. But I have now settled in on Linux Mint 13 KDE. I really liked Cinnamon better than any other distribution, but I always liked the integration and aesthetics of KDE better. I am dual booting now with Win7 and Mint. I still have some Windows stuff I have to use for work, so as soon as I can migrate away completely I will.