Decided to give it another go as my laptop (a Hewlett Packard nx9420) came with Vista and I've been finding it painfully slow. I had a look at Distrowatch and decided that Ubuntu/Mint looked pretty cool and plumped for Mint as I liked the name! I already had Vista installed, so I used Acronis Disk Director to repartition the hard drive to create a new partition for my Linux install, and then just bunged in the live CD and installed into the new partition. The Mint boot manager recognises the Vista install and I can still boot, pretty painless!
No major questions just yet - after reading through these forums and googling (a lot
). Here are some of the things I struggled with:ATI Mobility X1600 graphics card - after spending ages trying to config via terminal, I read up on the Envy package and went down that route instead. Couldn't sort out conflicts with old (failed) install attempts so I did a clean install of mint, enabled the restricted driver, then installed Envy and the ATI drivers. On reboot I had the white screen of death, but thanks to this post http://albertomilone.com/wordpress/?p=139 I found that all I needed was:
sudo depmod -ae
So I'm now using my monitor at it's native 1680x1050 resolution.
The next issue was DVD playback skipping - that was resolved by enabling DMA mode, and also redirecting video playback in software to X11.
Liking Mint so far - and I'm pleased to see that my wireless network card was detected even on the live CD and straight away my wireless lan was detected. Hurray to no more messing with ndiswrapper!
Have just installed Avant Window Manager too and enjoying the MAC stylie!
I'm sure I'll be back with questions when I start trying to share files and printers with the rest of my Windows network.......
