Some ideas for additional assistance when installing mint

[hoppel]

I'd like to see some more assistance when setting up Mint. There are several stepps which have to be made to make Linux usable and which are quite annoying because it's more then just searching for the nicest gui skin.

These are:
1. Setting up the screen resolution. I have a 20" tft and want to use 1600*1200. Until now I have to edit xorg.conf to get the full resolution. There should be an easy to use tool for it.
2. Setting up additional mouse buttons. Again, something which causes editing the xorg.conf. Not user-friendly and an error source for people who use Linux for the first time. Again: In my opinion nobody should be forced to get in contact with xorg.conf at such an early stage.
2b. I'd like to add the wish for the possibility of using additional mouse buttons for nautilus, like it is already working for firefox and opera and like it works for the Windows explorer.
3. A backup solution which is able to recover all settings and installed programms when making a new install. The old programms do not have to be saved completly for me (although it would make sense for offline-users), but it would be nice to have an automatically generated list of all installed programms which can be used by synaptic/apt/mintinstall to reinstall all previously used software.
4. A easy to use audio management. It took me several months using Linux to figure out, why my internal audiochip didn't produce sound - it was a simpel solution, I just had to change inline to outline and vice versa... but it was difficult to detect. Using jack is not really difficult but it's to overloaded and for a noob it looks like a bug not to have sound. One should be asked by an assistant at the beginning, whether there is something to hear, and then be routed through possible error solutions.
5. This is a quite personal wish, which might be difficult to solve: I'm chatting with Miranda using WINE. Since I want to use it all the time I'd like to start Miranda at startup - but if I do so, Miranda doesn't open a window in the try but instead a little Wine window with the tray icon inside. No problems when starting after booting. Maybe something can be done from the mint team...
6. Additional repisotories with newer software - Maybe disabled by default but easy to activate. I'd like to use the newest versions of Firefox, Open Office and Thunderbird... And more software would be nice, too.
7. When migration from Windows to Linux a nice helping step is using Firefox and Thunderbird profiles from both OS together. Right now this needs a bit of "hand work", by editing some configuration files. This could also be done by a tool.
8. I'd like to have easy to use, desktop integrated knowledge base (like I proposed already in another thread). It should offer answers to simple questions, like: "how can I rip, shrink and burn a dvd" or "how can I extract a picture from a pdf file". These are mostly questions concerning the usage of software and sometimes these questions are about finding the right software. This knowledge base could offer answers to that questions, descriptions of available software and links for mintinstall or sources for synaptic.
9. An editor with gui for GRUB

Ok, that's all - for now

[Jimlen]

I have installed Mint on two computers. One, a rather modern 2Gh amd 64 laptop; the other a 350 Mh Pentium II mmx desktop machine. What I have found very irritating about the install process is that the installer cannot be reached until after the live cd is running. This is not much of an issue with the laptop. On the other hand, installing Mint Bianca and Mint Celena on the pentium machine has taken some three hours or more and once more than one attempt. It does not have to be this way, surely. I recognize an effort to avoid two discs which Ubuntu used at least as recently as Kubuntu 6.06 (which incidently installed directly and without fuss).

My request is that the installer inquire upfront whether the use of the CD is for installation or for "live" use and proceed directly from there. Running live with only 192 MB of ram is a painful thing to watch!

[hoppel]

@ Ede

1. Doesn't work for my configuration - all I get without editing is 1280x1024.
3. I know these steps, but it could be simpler
7. Yes
8. No

[McLovin]

all i can say about things is on #2, the reason the mouse configuring needs to go the route of editing the xorg file is not a Mint problem, it's a linux, and hardware driver problem. Most mouse manufacturers are not making drivers for linux and are not really supporting linux, as in my case, i have a logitech mx610 laser mouse with like 10 buttons, and i have to edit my xorg for the simple fact that logitech does not make a driver for linux for it. so this issue you should be taking up with the hardware manufacturers, not the Mint team. There are some mice that are have multi button support, just not too many.

[lakehousetech]

I'm hoping that the newer kernel releases and popularity in linux aid in the addition of more modules for hardware. I've had numerous problems since I got my new laptop. I almost wish I didn't get rid of the old one because it ran Daryna like a dream. Anyway, I guess time will tell. Editing the xorg.conf over and over to get things just right is indeed a pain in the ass.

[hoppel]

@ McLovin

I think you're wrong. Firstly, nearly every mouse I see in today stores has more than two buttons and a wheel. Secondly and most important, you don't need a special driver for a common mouse, even it has 100 buttons. The usual drivers covers it, but in Linux you have to edit xorg.conf to tell the OS, that there are more than three buttons (and, to be specific, the name of the device). It's ok for me to tell this to the OS by myself, but I cannot understand why I have to do this manually with an editor, which needs root privileges... The point is, a new user without any Linux knowledge will not be able to do it, while this could easily be done by a tool. Don't forget, it is easy to destroy important things by editing xorg.conf, this file should nobody edit who doesn't exactly know what he/she is doing. And since Mint already asks the user some questions after installation, why not adding the question "How many buttons does your mouse have?".

I once (must be 5 years minimum from then) tested BeOS for quite a while. For that OS existed an open source or freeware tool which did exactly what I want. The programmer also collected a database of mice so many of them run out of the box.
Since it worked for an operating system which nearly nobody uses and for which nearly no open source programmer works, it's a bit of a shame that nobody made such a tool for Linux. Instead you get several pages of guidelines how to do it yourself by hacking the xorg.conf.

And one thing I haven't even solved yet: I'd like to use my two additional buttons to navigate through nautilus like I already do in Firefox and Opera - I already read somewhere that this is possible, but nobody could tell me how to do it.