Mint Debian Fail

[itlarson]

I have had high hopes for Mint Debian, and had good luck with the Xfce version on a netbook. Unfortunately two problems got in the way of me using it on my main desktop computer.

First, only my root and home partitions mounted. I have several other drives for witch I specified mount points in the partitioning tool, but they didn't mount. when I looked in fstab, I found they were specified by device name, not UUID. Even so, they should have mounted, and I am not sure why they didn't. No doubt I could have edited fstab manually, but I never got to it because of the second problem, which I will describe next.

When I first booted from the live CD, the resolution was wrong. I have a run of the mill 1680x1050 monitor, and a new nvidia gt-430 card, so I found this surprising. I installed anyway, figuring the Nvidia drivers wound fix this, Since there is no proprietary drivers tool in Mint Debian, I followed the instructions at http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/331". Unfortunately on reboot I got a blank screen. I tried a few things, but ran out of time, and just installed Mint 11. It got the resolution right running off the live
CD, and installed the Nvidia drivers without any issues.

I am still hoping to use Mint Debian in the future, and I know a new proprietary drivers tool is on the to-do list for the development team. In the mean time, is it worth reporting these issues as bugs?

[lambikas]

You should try LMDE again when re-spin is out, since it will have new kernel and lot more updates which should fix your problem.

As for the LMDE team - you are scaring people away having out-dated iso-s.

[itlarson]

Any Idea when that happens? I did notice that Mint-deb still had Firefox 3.6 still. My Xfce netbook has Firefox 5. I suppose I could have run updates, but I Know how long that takes.

[lambikas]

Soon, as there are new re-spins in testing.

[telenux]

Fail is the right word.

I have a Mint LMDE 10 iso on a usb stick and lots of issues if I want to try it out.

It seems that new bugs are with the newer edition? I don't think the Mint ppl know what they're doing.

I'm tired of the graphics, too, with the console. There's no option to shut that off.

There were no wireless utility of any kind as default.

They don't tell you that you have to create your own password to get root user privileges.

I don't know if this is changing for their new edition (I'm only interested in the xfce respin for an old laptop) but I'm seriously thinking to just install straight Debian and configure it.

[Roken]

LMDE works fine, even fully updated, but does require more effort than standard mint to get everything going, and the two areas that you've described are typical of where extra effort is required.

To address the graphics driver issue first, this is almost certainly a problem with your xorg.conf created when you installed the propriety drivers. A more reliable way to install gfx drivers (and what will be the basis for the Mint tool) is to use sgfxi (smxi.org). It looks scarier than it is, but will take care of installing both NVidia and ATI drivers, and configuring your system properly to use them.

Once fixed, you will probably have no option but to edit /etc/fstab to mount your other partitions. If they are NTFS partitions and easier way is to use ntfs-config from the repository. If not, create the appropriate fstab entries using UUID rather than lable, which is more reliable and is becoming the default anyway.

[h2-1]

sgfxi, svmi, and smxi live on smxi.org but each has their separate googlecode svn site. But smxi.org is the true home page/site for those scripts. There is no sgfxi.org or svmi.org, but there is inxi.org which points to the inxi home page/svn site.

[Roken]

I knew that h2. Typing error - corrected in my original post, thank you

[dritzominous]

If you don't like fixing things every now and then, stick with the main edition.

The Debian edition doesn't claim to be for beginners for a reason.