http://linuxinternationals.freeforums.o ... 27-15.htmlI'm writing this on my laptop on a mint 5 rev1 gnome install on my dell xps1710 laptop.
As many of you know I pretty much hate gnome, but although I have a few issues with this install I am overall very impressed.
Here are my findings and concerns so far on this laptop.
Installation:
Pretty slow, but not really an issue in the scheme of things... From the live cd it's slow to boot but picks the right splash screen size and resolution.. 1920x1280 desktop resolution, however after installation the splash screen size is way too small... no real issue as I could fix that if I cared about it.
Updating:
Pretty slow from the update manager thing, but once it gets going: good debian download speeds. I like this very much... I could get used to it and would feel very happy leaving a new to linux user with this update method.
Wifi:
On this laptop we have the currently a pain in “a” intel 3945 wifi card...rip ipw3945 drivers. I assume the ubuntu repos have an old iwl driver... Since other than the expected wifi light not working it has been pretty stable... That said mint/ubuntu are using an old kernel a 24 one.. perhaps some of my recent issues with sidux on this laptop were due to the fact that there were major wifi changes since the 25 kernel. Reception/ signal strength seems quite a lot lower than the old ipw3945
drivers, but this has nothing to do with mint at all.
Codecs/ nvidia drivers etc:
Codecs... I don't know about this.. not tried to play anything yet, but I doubt there will be any issues as mint is good for codecs etc... Life without kaffeine/ amarok could be tricky though although I know I can install both of these apps and k3b if the gnome brasero annoys..
Envy handled installing a nvidia; albeit old driver for my 7900 easily and painlessly. Flash player just works, no messing about with firefox3 ect... Incidentally no issues at all with ff3 updated at all.
Nautilus:
Well I need some help with this one.. I don't understand how to use it. If I run it as root (sudo) I can get a split view but I can't work out how to get a split view as a user which makes the nautilus navigator pretty much useless. I'm sure there will be an easy way to do this, perhaps a gnome user could advise? Also what's the adding nfs shares ability of nautilus as I don't see a connect to or view nfs share option? Really Nautilus is pretty cr*p with a capital K... lol... I can see me using mc a lot with this distro.
Open Office:
Before the update.. Nice mint themed open office splash screen... Replaced with a sh*t coloured one...
That said.. Full marks to mint/ubuntu for the open office setup. Fantastic... Spell checker etc automatically set to use my UK spell check settings etc.. Great stuff.
General theme/ setting...
Default isn't too bad.. Very easy to get something I really like as well... A little buggy but even I found the themes... I went peppermint as it's the only one I found with a dark taskbar with white writing, I did have to customize the theme with carbon for the colours.. So I've ended up with something that I think looks fine... No mean feat for a gnome distro.. With open office I set the page colour to white and the font to black.... Looks great.. Firefox was unaffected display wise with the theme change and looks great.. usb mouse forward and back buttons/ ctrl scroll all good... I don't know how to make the taskbar normal sized width wise ie.. about ¾ of the width of the screen for me, but I can live with the taskbar as it is. The gnome menu is not as customisable as kick off or tasty menu, but it's kind of growing on me... The un-install app from it is really nice as expected as I'd heard about that before.
Keyboard shortcuts:
Help needed with this.. How to set a keyboard shortcut for a terminal???
As for the media keys... great.. media direct key is now a firefox launcher.. volume media keys work by default....
Security:
Mint falls down big time on this as do all ubuntu distros I've encountered. It's ok for a one user desktop distro, but completely useless when more than one user is involved on a system. I really couldn't put this distro out to families as a user being able to delete partitions etc... What the hell? Maybe a ubuntu based distro user could explain to me the logic of this? On installation I opted to have a root user.. How to allow a user to update, but not be able to install software, mess with partitions/ other users folders etc as this is crazy stupid for a user to have this power?
In conclusion:
On this laptop although considerably slower than many kde distro's, this is really nice to use and a lot less dumbed down than a normal gnome distro. I like it and although I have a few issues I would imagine that they are issues that are because of unfamiliarity more than anything else. I'll keep mint on this laptop as the main os for a while. I think although a bit sluggish it's by far the best gnome distro I've ever used and it's pretty idiot proof so I'm going to give it a good go as it could replace pclos as the transition from windows to linux distro of choice. So I really like it although the security implications are unacceptable if there were to be more than just one user...
Here is another review and lots of comments from the Linux Internationals forum:
http://linuxinternationals.freeforums.o ... -t327.html