[Solved] Recent Linux Adventures

Archived topics about LMDE 1 and LMDE 2
Locked
bustard

[Solved] Recent Linux Adventures

Post by bustard »

I bought a new pc - I5, Ivy Bridge and installed the 64-bit version of mint mate.

It froze the pc one or more times a day.

I gave up and tried mint debian. Installed easily and worked well until I updated it with the 1300 or so packages. The last thing I was asked about was where to install grub. I picked sda1 because it sounded nice. I guess that was a mistake because I could not reboot - could not find a partition or some such message.

So I tried to install the real debian but it did not install. Then I tried Suse, which installed nicely and looked and acted very professional. The only problem was, it did not have programs I have gotten used to like Motion, and it did not play .mp4 or .mkv files, and I could not find the repositories that had the drivers that would allow them to be played.

So I tried ubuntu 12.04 which installed nicely and did not freeze within 24 hours of use. But I could not abide that stupid panel along the left side of the screen and the fact that I could not even create a launcher on the desktop. Apparently there is some complex way of doing it, but I am pretty much a civilian and want things to just work.

So I went back to mint debian, re-installed it and had it tweaked to my liking in 10 minutes. I backed up an image of it just in case, and then started the 1300-package upgrade which is running as I type. This time, I'll try some other option when it asks me where to put grub (maybe you can suggest something), and since I have an image of the tweaked but pre-upgrade version of the os, I can jump back to where I was.

All in all, if I can get the update done properly, I will pray that mint debian does not freeze, and, I hope, be done with distro-shopping for a long while.
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 2 times in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
Mr.Hr1e

Re: Recent Linux Adventures

Post by Mr.Hr1e »

Install it on sda or just skip.
zerozero

Re: Recent Linux Adventures

Post by zerozero »

[moved here]
squeezy

Re: Recent Linux Adventures

Post by squeezy »

bustard wrote:The last thing I was asked about was where to install grub. I picked sda1 because it sounded nice...
Not a valid concept.
bustard wrote:This time, I'll try some other option when it asks me where to put grub (maybe you can suggest something)...
Where did you install grub when you initially installed LMDE? That's where you want to have it installed again. It's odd that it asks you, usually it will just upgrade the installation you currently have. I've never been asked where to install a grub update once it's already installed initially.
bustard

Re: Recent Linux Adventures

Post by bustard »

Thank you for the replies. I tried sda this time and it worked.
caerolle

Re: [Solved] Recent Linux Adventures

Post by caerolle »

bustard, are you new to Linux? If so, it seems that Mint 13, Maya, might provide a better starting point. Mint Debian typically requires a lot of maintenance and Linux know-how over the long run, while regular Mint doesn't, especially the LTS versions (long-term support). Those you can load and leave for several years, and just do the updates through the Update program. Very easy to maintain! As it turns out, Mint 13, the newest edition, is an LTS version.

I know you said that you installed 'Mate', by which I am guessing you meant Mint 13 with MATE, and it didn't work out so well. However, I wonder if perhaps you got a bad install somehow. You have new, mainstream hardware, so it should work well with Mint 13. Before you get a lot invested in using Mint Debian, you may want to consider having another go at Mint 13/MATE.

FWIW,

caerolle :)
bustard

Re: [Solved] Recent Linux Adventures

Post by bustard »

caerolle wrote:bustard, are you new to Linux? If so, it seems that Mint 13, Maya, might provide a better starting point. Mint Debian typically requires a lot of maintenance and Linux know-how over the long run, while regular Mint doesn't
Thanks for the suggestion. It is confusing to me because if I go to http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php it shows linux mint maya, under which is mate, cinnamon, kde, etc. It seems from that, that if you install mate you are installing a version of maya. Or do I have it wrong?

I ran mate 32-bit for a good while with no problems. When I bought the new pc, I installed mate 64-bit which froze x times/day.

That is the reason that I have gone to mint debian, hoping that the basics of the os are different enough from maya/mint that I won't see the freezing. I am assuming that any of the other maya sub-distros, such as cinnamon or kde will also have the freezing problem. At least, looking at posts here, it seems that a lot of people have had freezing problems with them.

If debian proves too difficult I will probably go back to ubuntu 12.04, or maybe by that time the freezing problem will have been fixed.

So far, though, it is working well for most of the stuff I do.
caerolle

Re: [Solved] Recent Linux Adventures

Post by caerolle »

Maya is the current core version, Mint 13. MATE, Cinnamon, KDE, all those are desktop environments, which is your graphic user interface. So, anything you choose from that download page is really basically the same operating system, with a different look-and-feel. MATE and Cinnamon are very similar, are really different revisions of the same thing. KDE is (to me) more complicated. I used Xfce, which is the simplest. Really, to start with, I'd recommend MATE, with all the codecs. You can add any of the other desktop environments later, then select which one you want to use when you log in. With your system, I really don't know why the 64-bit version would be crashy, personally I am stubborn, and probably would try it again, lol.

As far as Ubuntu goes, Mint is derived from that, and is IMHO a much-improved version. Things work for me in Mint that don't with Ubuntu. Plus, most people really like the MATE and Cinnamon desktop environments much better than they do the Unity desktop environment (the one Ubuntu currently uses).
Locked

Return to “LMDE Archive”