Problems with Mint!

[keithp]

I hope that this is the correct section to post this.

I run Mint13 Mate as my main distro. No problems whatever and am delighted with it.

Over the past days, I have been trying the live DVD's of Mint15. Disaster.

Mint15 Mate: OK if the first thing I do is to load the Nvidia304 driver. If I try to run anything else first, it crashes with the screen filled with "hash".

Mint15 Cinnemon: Crashes as soon as it has finished loading with the hash desktop again.

Mint15XFCE RC: Crashes as soon as it has finished loading.

Mint15KDE RC: Loads OK. Crashes if I try to run anything. Driver Manager won't run and install a proprietary driver, but it's the only thing which doesn't cause a crash.

Continuing my investigations, I have run the live CD's of the new versions of several other distros, with no problems.

It looks as though I will have to wait for the next MintLTS and see if that is any different.

Sorry if this sounds like a moan, but I am very disappointed with Mint15.

Cheers.

Keith

[hal8000]

Wait until the RC releases become stable or install Mint14 KDE if you want slightly newer packages.

Distrowatch will list some of the Mint packages available:
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=mint

[keithp]

hal8000.

I've been trying again to get Mate, Cinnemon, KDE, and XFCE to work. No success.

Not had problems with any earlier versions of Mint.

So I have abandoned them all and will quietly stay with my Mate13 until the next LTS.

Cheers

Keith

[TBABill]

Keith, any chance you could try a different distro just to see if it's a hardware/driver issue causing the failures? Drivers are built into the kernel (modules) so I wonder if this would happen in PCLinuxOS (very easy distro to use like Mint) or another that may be equally easy in self-configuration.

It sounds like a kernel regression to me. You may also be able to find some Ubuntu PPA's that contain newer kernels that you can upgrade to in order to see if that gets around the boot problems. Only difficulty with that is having a usable machine long enough to get the new kernel installed.

[keithp]

@TBABill

Many thanks for your reply.

I've been doing more testing, running the latest live DVDs of several distros. That's why there has been this delay in answering you. Here are results:

The following load and run normally, with no sign of crashing.

PCLinuxOS 32, PCLinuxOS 64, PCLinuxOS Minime, Mageia3, Debian7 Gnome, Debian7 XFCE, SolydK, SolydX.

The following crash:

OpenSUSE, Mint15 Mate/Cinnemon/XFCE/KDE, Ubuntu, KUbuntu, XUbuntu.

Earlier versions of all these distros are OK!

To complicate matters, Ubuntu runs normally for about five minutes before it crashes. KUbuntu and XUbuntu crash immediately.

Explanation of "crashing". When booting ends, sometimes there will immediately be a blank screen covered with rows of short dashes (rather like a CRT whose horizantal hold has gone), and sometimes the desktop will appear for a couple of seconds, but it will be frozen. Then it will change to the "hash" screen.

Cheers

Keith