Newbie questions

.ee · Post by **.ee** » Wed Feb 07, 2007 7:30 pm

I hope our gurus will also visit this thread to help us newbies.

My first question (I know it is stupid):
how I can enable multiple desktops (if I can) in Mint.
Ubuntu and Xubuntu give me four desktops by default.

My second: Mint did not mount my NTFS partition properly It did mount FAT32 though). I can see the icon of NTFS partition on the desktop, but it is empty when I click on the icon. Other distributions like Kanotix and Puppy linux did it authomatically for me. What can I do?

3. I have installed emacs and xemacs. Unfortunately, the graphics and fonts in both are of lower quality than I am used to on university's linux server and when using cygwin under Windows on my laptop. Is it improvable? Probably, the problem is not Mint specific.

4. What I can do to be able to hibernate my laptop?

Post by **clem** » Wed Feb 07, 2007 9:10 pm

2. upgrade to mintDisk 1.5, restart X and paste the content of /usr/lib/linuxmint/mintDisk/mintDisk.log

Clem

.ee · Post by **.ee** » Fri Feb 09, 2007 4:29 pm

Upgrade to 1.5 has helped. It works as it should now. I suspect that
the difficulties I still had after the upgrade to 1.5 were due to the fact that
my Windows were in hibernation mode.

Where I can read about the possible risk with using this software when writing to NTFS. Or, maybe, my concerns are outdated?

I still don't know how to set multiple (at least two) virtual desktops in Mint,
something Ubuntu installs by default.

Alephcat · Post by **Alephcat** » Mon Feb 12, 2007 6:43 am

Linux Mint actually comes with 2 desktops as default, but the pager is not on the panel, to add it right click on an empty space on the panel and select "Add to Panel". In the box that appears find the "Desktop & Windows" section and click on"Workspace Switcher" then click add it should then appear on the panel where you right clicked, you can move it about by right clicking on it and selecting move. To add more virtual desktops right click on it and increase the number of work spaces to the desired amount.

.ee · Post by **.ee** » Mon Feb 12, 2007 6:59 pm

Thanks, Alephcat!

Thanks to forum's help I enjoy four virtual desktops now.

I haven't checked it carefully, but it seems (based on gkrellm) that virtual desktop s take considerably more processor resources than a program I have been using under windows. The latter hardly had an impact on the processor load, while my background processor load now (40-50% with 4 desktops and with only files and multiple epiphany browser windows open) is much higher than yesterday: below 5% with 1 desktop and about the same number of open applications). Maybe there is an opportunity for future OS optimization here?

Alephcat · Post by **Alephcat** » Tue Feb 13, 2007 6:58 am

the higher usage may have been due to Beagles indexing running in the back ground, that does tend to take up large chunks of processor time from time to time, but I can not say for sure.

.ee · Post by **.ee** » Mon Feb 19, 2007 10:28 am

Alephcat,
you may be right. After the (presumably) indexing was over, the processor usage is low. I was not able to detect a difference in battery life between Windows and Linux on my laptop. It is the same up to 10-15 minutes (well, it makes around 5%), and I can't even tell which one is better.

I noticed that the system goes into a forced hibernation too early (at 5% of the bettery or like). I would like to set it to 1-2% level. How can I do it?

Alephcat · Post by **Alephcat** » Tue Feb 20, 2007 7:05 am

there does not appear to be a way of changing what level it considers critical using the GUI tools, I'll have to go away and see if I can find anything that tells me how to change it