Hi all again a few questions about Linux Mint 9

[edjon2000]

Hello again after a long lay-off

I have been looking at moving everything over to Linux and to be honest, I have to say, that Linux Mint has always offered the best version, I had some great times with Mint 7, especially with the ease of installation, I could pick a drive or partition that I wished to install mint on and it all went brilliantly, however, when Mint 8 came out I tried it and decided that it became far to complex to set up as I had to re-order my HDD's in BIOS just to get it to work(similar to Debian) I have to say that this alone turned me away from Mint 8 so I preferred to stick with Mint 7.

Now coming back to the Mint site and forum, I see that Mint 9 has been released, please could you assure me that I will not encounter the same problems again, or should I stick to Mint 7, until you sort out the installer, please don't get me wrong I think Linux Mint is the best interpretation of Linux I just don't want to run into similar problems again as I will be dual booting Mint and Windows XP Pro.

I look forward to hearing from you

Jon.

[viking777]

OK I probably won't be popular for saying this (an it certainly won't be the majority view) but in my opinion Mint 7 was the best distro that Mint have produced to date (more than that it was the best Linux distro I have ever used to date). Mint 8 and Mint 9 are not as good, but having said that I use Mint 9 now and I don't have any major problems with it.

The difference is down to the kernel, nothing to do with Mint itself. The kernel supplied by default with Mint 7 was superb, since then it has been 'improved' and that has only made it worse.

When I eventually deleted Mint 7 it was with a very heavy heart, I don't think you will have too much difficulty with Mint9 though. As for having to 're-order' drives with Mint8 then I have no knowledge about that apart from the fact that the installer would not install properly to drives higher than about /sda10. If that is what you are talking about then I don't know if it has changed or not since all of my Mint distros now live on a partition numbered less than 10 (the fault was with the installer which I guess was originally a Debian invention so it didn't just affect Mint but Ubuntu also). Strangely enough it doesn't affect Debian itself though since I have Debian stable on sda12 and it installed without problem.

[edjon2000]

Hi viking777

Thanks for your reply, I also really liked Mint 7, whilst it was based initially on the Debian core and by extension also Ubuntu which up until Mint was released basically took the title for the friendliest Linux Distro out there I have to give 2 thumbs up to the Mint development team as they were able to supply a version even better than Ubuntu, mainly due to their uasge of proprietry software support which for me worked out brilliantly, I have an Nvidia Graphics card and a Sound Blaster sound card, Mint 7 was the first of the distros to offer this, and I had tried a lot of different distros in fact Fedora core came a very close second.

I have to sadly admit to the fact that I do like the gnome versions, as for me, they seem to be the most familiar interpretation as I come from a Windows background.

I guess a lot of us do

As regards my opinion of Windows, I like XP but am not keen on either Vista or 7, being a coder at heart and coming from the old Sinclair Spectrum, Atari background, I like to get my hands dirty, so to speak so Linux is like a breath of fresh air to me (Yes I know it is complicated and a heck of a learning curve) and in 20 Years I may still be a newbie but at least I am getting back to the roots of how an OS should be.

For now I use Windows for Gaming (yes even at 51 years old) and for one other software application (bet you can't guess what it is ), actually you probably can, ** hint ** I design websites also.

I apologise for the rambling but it is great to get to talk to fellow Linux Users

Jon.

[edjon2000]

Ok a question for the Devs

Having read through the installation pdf it does seem to hail back to the Mint 7 installer, when it says use the entire hard drive does it mean the entire physical hard drive or does it mean the entire logical hard drive (i.e. a partition that in windows) is classed as a hard drive.

Jon.

[viking777]

I apologise for the rambling but it is great to get to talk to fellow Linux Users

Well, there are a lot of us around to 'ramble' to (perhaps not so many at this time of year - northern hemisphere summer holidays etc) so I hope you enjoy it here and enjoy Mint too - whichever version you choose to use.

[viking777]

Ok a question for the Devs

Having read through the installation pdf it does seem to hail back to the Mint 7 installer, when it says use the entire hard drive does it mean the entire physical hard drive or does it mean the entire logical hard drive (i.e. a partition that in windows is classed as a hard drive.

Jon.

Entire physical drive, if you have anything else installed already it will wipe it out.

NB if you understand a little bit about disks and drives (and is sounds as if you might) your best bet will always be manual partitioning - far more control, and btw don't worry about making the wrong choices and not being able to change your mind, there is always an 'Are you sure' dialog before any partitioning takes place.

[edjon2000]

Thanks viking777 for coming back to me so quickly,

Yeah I guess I will have to clear some space, or alternatively go for a manual installation.

If I go for a manual installation what are the recommended sizes?

I guess say in a 40GB space maybe 2GB boot 8GB swap and the rest(30GB) for the installation, what do you think?

Jon.

[edjon2000]

lol we cross-posted viking777

Thanks for the advice, what do you think about my idea of disk space settings for a manual installation?

To give you a rough Idea of my system I have the following ( and yes, I know that Linux does not use drive letters )

A: Floppy Drive
C: 111GB SATA Drive (contains windows XP pro) Boot drive (Physical Hard Drive)
D: 111GB SATA Drive (contains data) (Physical Hard Drive)
E: CDRW Drive
F: DVD RW Drive
G: 80GB IDE Drive (contains data) (Physical Hard Drive)
H: 109GB IDE Drive Partition(also contains data) Actual Size 160GB (Logical Hard drive)
I: 40GB Additional Partition on H: Drive {Place I would like to install Mint) (Logical Hard Drive)

Hope this helps

Jon.

[edjon2000]

Well I will try out Mint 9 using the manual install option if I have any problems I will just switch back to Mint 7 at least I know for sure that it works and doesn't mess with my Disk Drives.

The other thing I have found out is that Grub 2 does not work with my machine so I hope that Mint 9 doesn't use that.

Any confirmation on that would be greatly appreciated as I said in my previous posts Mint 7 works great but for some reason Mint 8 didn't and I would hate to have to re-install everything again (I don't have the benefit of an external hard drive) because Mint 9 has the same problems as Mint 8

Jon.

[edjon2000]

Hmm this is interesting,

I downloaded the ISO file from your UK mirror server and received this file
linuxmint-9-gnome-dvd-i386.iso

So I tried burning it to a DVD+RW disc using Nero and Nero reported that the file was not a DVD+RW file but a CD+RW file, now, at 763MB, that would be pushing it a bit for a CD+RW file, I was able to bypass that using Nero Burning Rom SE and forcing it to burn to a DVD+RW and, I am sure it will work fine, however it might be a good idea to double-check the ISO file on your UK server to see if there is something a bit weird with it, having said that it could also be a Nero based problem although I have not had any problems with Nero in the past.

[edjon2000]

Actually the install was busted, my system didn't even pick up on the fact the the DVD ISO was bootable, so based on that I have gone back to Mint 7 which installed like a dream (well almost like a dream after I chucked away 57.79 GB of data) the manual install didn't work at all, so I installed it on an 80GB drive using the "entire drive" option from the installation screen.

I will be installing LAMP as well using the "task sel install LAMP" command and then maybe I can address the problem I am trying to sort out (there seems to be 2 options with this particular problem, it seems to work on Linux but not Windows) hence the reason for reinstalling Mint 7 so I can run some comparisons, hopefully I can now come up with some useful suggestions.

At the end of the day PHP is PHP so why should the platform it is run on have differing results anyway, that is my problem to sort out

I am sure Mint 9 is great but for me Mint 7 is familiar until the Mint 9 problems are sorted out.

To the Devs, Please keep up the great work

Jon.

[edjon2000]

Hello again,

I have managed to finally install mint 9 and so far it seems to have no issues in fact it works very well indeed.

All I did was re-download the live cd iso and burn it to disc from within mint 7 and then Installed Mint 9 to where my Mint 7 partition was.

Jon.