Very Disappointed!

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gilead

Very Disappointed!

Post by gilead »

I expected much more from you guys!
My father was running on mint 12 and all was well until the adobe plugins would not update. Apparently, the only flash plugs that do work are the mint ones. I tried the others from the software manager and no dice.

So I figured, since 14 was up and available, I'd simply upgrade him to 14. Well I downloaded the KDE version, because I like the desktop, burned the DVD and it takes forever to come up, although I understand it is running off the dvd, so it would take longer. When it finally tried to install, it could not create the partition tables. I thought it might be a hardware problem, so we went out and got another hdd; same brand, same size. At 33% of creating the partition table, it dies and says it can't do it.

So I thought I must have a bum distro, so I went back and downloaded the KDE, cinnamon and MATE from an entirely different server, just to be safe. Today I go over and I tried each one. None of which would completely install. It would format, set up the partition table and die while installing files. No activity on the dvd or the hdd and a spinning circle.
:evil:

I resorted to installing Windows XP home and it worked, so it's not a hardware problem. If someone know how to fix this or a decent place to get a WORKING distro, please let me know.

Thanks!
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karlchen
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Joined: Sat Dec 31, 2011 7:21 am
Location: Germany

Re: Very Disappointed!

Post by karlchen »

Hello, gilead.

May I assume that the main purpose of your post was to express your frustration and that you are not really interested in analyzing and solving the problems which you ran into? If this is the case, fine, you have expressed your frustration. No need to spend too many thoughts on the reasons why you ran into trouble.

If, however, you should be interested in finding out why you experienced all the trouble, then it would be helpful to elaborate a little bit more in details what exactly went wrong.

Lisa Mint (Mint 12) and current Flash plugins:

One of the very first things which I did on my freshly installed Mint 12 was uninstalling the Mint flash plugin and replace it by the adobe-flashplugin. It is available through the normal repository. It is always a few versions ahead of the Mint flash plugin. And I have never experienced any problems using it on Mint 12. So I am a bit in doubt why this should fail on your Mint 12 system?


About the Mint 14 ISO images

You report that you downloaded different ISO images of Mint 14, with KDE desktop, with Mate desktop, with Cinnamon desktop. You report that all of these ISO images when burnt to a DVD failed to partition your harddisk.
Have you bothered to verify the checksums of the downloaded ISO image files prior to burning them to DVD?
Which software have you used to burn them to DVD? - Personally I have had to learn that Brasero seems pretty likely to create unusable boot DVDs. So I will never again use Brasero for this purpose. (In fact, more often than not I burnt the DVDs on Windows using InfraRecorder.)
When the live systems failed to create the partition tables, they will not have done so silently. They will have displayed an error message. Which one exactly?

You see even without having asked a single question about the harddisk and its type (EIDE, SATA, Raid level etc) we have identified several potential sources of trouble which may have lead to corrupt live systems, which then cannot be expected to function properly.

Side note:

On the machine where I am typing this, Mint 12 worked fine without any serious problems. Currently the same machine runs 3 different Ubuntu / Mint flavours without any hassle: Mint 13 xfce, Mint 14 Cinnamon, Ubuntu 10.04.4.
The hard disk has been partitioned by the Mint 13 live system and the Gparted version which comes on the live system without experiencing any trouble at all.
So Mint live systems are no bum distroes. And as a rule downloading them will work correctly. Yet, any download can fail from time to time because of technical problems which can affect any internet connection. This is a fact. It is not the fault of the ISO image which you happen to download at the time of a connection problem.
The ISO images of Ubuntu 10.04.4, Mint 14 Cinnamon and Mint 13 xfce all have been downloaded just once. But prior to using them as a live system their checksums had been verified. So when using them I knew the image files were all right.


In case you really want help provide details:

Next time when you experience problems installing Mint 14 on a machine which could run a previous Mint version without problem:
Describe the problem as precisely as possible.
Give us the exact steps which you performed.
Tell us what you did when the error occurred. Post the exact error message.
Let us know the technical details of the affected machine. (inxi -Fx will give a concise overview of your system)
Then we may be able to help you find out what the root cause is and hopefully solve it.

Kind regards,
Karl
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ashtonford
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Re: Very Disappointed!

Post by ashtonford »

mint 13 cinnamon may be a better shot for you. mint 14 has had a few problems on some computers but it hasent been out as long. another thing get a rw dvd then if it dosent burn correctly you can just erase it and use it over again. also burn the dvd at the slowest speed that you can.
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