Bragging about my small Mint PC

[tacoz]

There are a few occasions when I get to promote Mint... mostly in the workplace.

(a) Whenever someone is showing off their latest cool gadget and no matter how BIG the cool factor might be, I enjoy interjecting and I am still surprised when my USB PC upstages whatever (and occasionally another Mint convert as well!)
(b) I work in a Microsoft environment... hundreds of 2003 and 2008 servers and mix of XP and Windows 7 clients; whenever I have to sort-out-fix-find some or other malware-virus that was supposed to have been taken out but wasn't for whatever reason I use my USB PC.
(c) When I need to recover data or partitions I use Testdisk on my USB PC.
(d) My colleagues know by now that if I'm gonna be presenting a meeting (as in an actual meeting room and using whatever available multimedia is there) then I'm gonna boot with my USB PC, remote to whatever LAN services or shares I might need and present whatever I have to present... but promoting and using Mint at the same time.

So what's so great about this USB? Well it's a regular pen-drive type so dimension wise it's small and formats to 8GB. It has Mint installed and the desktop appearance and apps are configured for my needs. Actually it pretty much lives in my pocket... until one of those occasions arrives. You can just imagine, a few years ago it was laptops being bragged about and now its either some Pad device or Android cell phone, and hey... I love gadgets and of course I enjoy seeing any new stuff... but then I pull out this plain looking USB device and brag about how small my 'parasite' PC is and that all it needs to function is a 'host'. Of course demonstrating it is the best!

I love bragging about Mint... especially in our Microsoft context. While I'm very good at working with my Microsoft stuff, I use Mint whenever I can. My home machines are all Mint based (one son prefers Mint KDE) and my work laptop only boots LMDE. I use a mix of rdesktop for LAN shares or admin and Oracle's VirtualBox (version 4 is really great!) to run a business client with Win 7 that has all the business AD policies applied to it. It keeps the upstream AD admins happy. I discovered Mint when a promo CD with v3.0 arrived at my desk. I moved from OpenSuse and have never bothered with any other distro since. Oh... there are at least 50 or so Mint users around this place!

[tdockery97]

Nice post tacoz

[willie42]

Very Impressive......

[Koninator]

Could you post picture of this mini PC.
Or is this just USB key with mint on it?
What is so special about it?

[inktitan]

[tacoz]

Could you post picture of this mini PC.
Or is this just USB key with mint on it?
What is so special about it?

This is one of those Lexar 1.5 inch-long-no-moving-parts-regular-type USB keys, about a quarter inch thick. Here in South Africa we just refer to these as "USBs" as opposed to those devices that actually contain a hard drive (solid state or otherwise) that we call "USB drives". I guess in my mind what makes it special is...

(a) it is portable; while I use a laptop at work when I have to walk somewhere and affect some or other remote support, it is simply convenient to take this "parasite PC" along, plug it in, boot with it and affect whatever the support was about and
(b) more importantly and in this forum's context, it is an opportunity--because you know someone is gonna ask what the heck you're doing--to show off Linux Mint!

Other than that... there is nothing special per se about said device.

[vrkalak]

Excellent post and 'rave' about Linux and Mint.

I, also, have one of these 8 Gb USB flash-drives with a Persistant Mint-9 LTS on it -- hangs on a ring with my personal keys. So it goes everywhere with me.

It's great to Show-off my Mint/Linux/Open Source work to everyone that is willing to listen/look.

I have made a couple of Linux converts with this simple USB flash-drive. Once I see that they are interested, I offer to give them a LiveCD of Mint-9 and printed instructions on How-to boot into the LiveCD.

They love it, when I tell them that they don't have to install anything and if they wish they can dual-boot with their Windows OS still in-place.

[denissonofyvon]

I think this is a great idea. These Linux distro's on USB are great for showing off as you hint in your post. It's a very versatile way to make your point on the spot. I have used that trick myself many times.

I also have the French version of puppy Linux on USB (TouTou Linux), always on hand. It works great for older computers and is easier on wifi for some reason (when compared to the Puppy English version). That being said Mint is still the best distro when it comes to compatibility with hardware as far as I can tell.

I have converted one wdos user (a coworker) to Mint and also, I have managed to convince my parents that Mint was a safer alternative to the other OS's for surfing on the net. My brother is on Ubuntu and more knowledgeable of informatics than I am, but I still convinced him to consider switching to Mint for himself and his mother in law.

In order for new users to adopt Mint, in most cases, things seems to go better when I install Mint myself on an older computer and sit with the user to configure the system to their liking, with lots of shortcuts on the desktop.

After that even users that have absolutely no understanding of Linux do very well with Mint. It's very stable and requires very little in terms of maintenance. (less than Ubuntu, don't ask, I don't know exactly why, it just does)

Mint team, you are the best
Denis