Multilingual and "fat" edition of Mint 9 created
Posted: Sat Jun 05, 2010 4:57 am
I've created a multilingual and customized, "fat" version of Linux Mint 9 based on the i386 Gnome DVD. The main goal was to have a live system for nontechnical users that can be used in emergencies if their primary systems (typically Windows) are broken. I wanted to make language and keyboard layout selection as easy as possible because having the wrong keyboard layout would be a major inconvenience for novice users. Therefore localization can be selected from a simple menu right at the boot prompt. The disc supports the following languages: English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Hungarian, with multiple keyboard layout options for some languages.
The DVD comes with a huge amount of software, about 1.7 GB compressed and 4.8 GB uncompressed, so a very wide selection of functionality is available out of the box and users don't have to worry about installing software or waiting for downloads when using slow or unreliable Internet connections. This makes the main menu somewhat cluttered but I thought this was a better compromise overall. For maximum compatibility, it's 32 bit only.
Some of the applications included:
- Firefox with Flash and Java plugins, and Adblock Plus installed and enabled, and Flashblock installed but disabled by default, it can be activated by a single click on a toolbar button
- Opera, Chromium, Midori
- Thunderbird, Evolution, mutt
- Pidgin (with OTR), Empathy, aMSN, Ekiga, XChat, irssi, Skype
- Vuze, aMule, DC++, FileZilla
- VLC, SMPlayer, Xine, Minitube, DumpHD
- Handbrake, dvd::rip, Avidemux, Arista, Audacity, EasyTag
- OpenOffice.org complete with translations, hyphenation rules, thesauruses and help files for all languages listed above, and basic support for many more languages
- GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, mtPaint, Picasa, Xara LX
- Python 2/3, Ruby, Sun JDK, Emacs, Geany, SciTE, gcc, autoconf, automake
- WINE, VirtualBox, KVM, DOSBox, dosemu
- TrueCrypt, KeePassX, OpenVPN (with NetworkManager support), Wireshark
- Google Earth, Frozen-Bubble, Crack Attack, Gnome games
The only changes done to the system were the following: Adblock and Flashblock setup (done in /etc/skel), a minor fix for Midori (done in /etc/skel), smarter minimum partition size calculation for the installer (done in initrd), keyboard preferences application added to favorites in the main menu (done in initrd, only applies to the live session), and the boot menu with language options. Only two applications were installed from third party repositories: Handbrake (PPA added) and TrueCrypt (installed from a .deb package), everything else comes from official Mint or Ubuntu archives. It's a pure Linux Mint 9 with tons of software and full support for many languages out of the box. No surprises, no hidden components or unusual behavior.
I've also installed a bunch of command line utilities useful to power users (Midnight Commander, lvm2, iptraf, socat, nmap, partimage etc.) but haven't installed components which would significantly modify the behavior of the system and aren't needed by average users (e.g. SSH server or NFS client). The following packages along with their dependencies have been copied to /var/cache/apt/archives so they can be installed even without an Internet connection:
- OpenSSH server, rssh, NFS client & server, NBD client & server, Open-iSCSI
- Dnsmasq, PowerDNS recursor, Postfix, vsftpd
- MySQL client, smbc, smbnetfs
- Enigmail (not installed by default because dependencies for some locales are broken for Enigmail in the official repositories and this in turn breaks the Gnome language selector tool)
This was my first encounter with Linux Mint and it was a very nice experience. I'm not sure the community would be interested in this modified disc but in case somebody would like to host it, let me know, as I don't have enough bandwidth to make it available for download.
The DVD comes with a huge amount of software, about 1.7 GB compressed and 4.8 GB uncompressed, so a very wide selection of functionality is available out of the box and users don't have to worry about installing software or waiting for downloads when using slow or unreliable Internet connections. This makes the main menu somewhat cluttered but I thought this was a better compromise overall. For maximum compatibility, it's 32 bit only.
Some of the applications included:
- Firefox with Flash and Java plugins, and Adblock Plus installed and enabled, and Flashblock installed but disabled by default, it can be activated by a single click on a toolbar button
- Opera, Chromium, Midori
- Thunderbird, Evolution, mutt
- Pidgin (with OTR), Empathy, aMSN, Ekiga, XChat, irssi, Skype
- Vuze, aMule, DC++, FileZilla
- VLC, SMPlayer, Xine, Minitube, DumpHD
- Handbrake, dvd::rip, Avidemux, Arista, Audacity, EasyTag
- OpenOffice.org complete with translations, hyphenation rules, thesauruses and help files for all languages listed above, and basic support for many more languages
- GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, mtPaint, Picasa, Xara LX
- Python 2/3, Ruby, Sun JDK, Emacs, Geany, SciTE, gcc, autoconf, automake
- WINE, VirtualBox, KVM, DOSBox, dosemu
- TrueCrypt, KeePassX, OpenVPN (with NetworkManager support), Wireshark
- Google Earth, Frozen-Bubble, Crack Attack, Gnome games
The only changes done to the system were the following: Adblock and Flashblock setup (done in /etc/skel), a minor fix for Midori (done in /etc/skel), smarter minimum partition size calculation for the installer (done in initrd), keyboard preferences application added to favorites in the main menu (done in initrd, only applies to the live session), and the boot menu with language options. Only two applications were installed from third party repositories: Handbrake (PPA added) and TrueCrypt (installed from a .deb package), everything else comes from official Mint or Ubuntu archives. It's a pure Linux Mint 9 with tons of software and full support for many languages out of the box. No surprises, no hidden components or unusual behavior.
I've also installed a bunch of command line utilities useful to power users (Midnight Commander, lvm2, iptraf, socat, nmap, partimage etc.) but haven't installed components which would significantly modify the behavior of the system and aren't needed by average users (e.g. SSH server or NFS client). The following packages along with their dependencies have been copied to /var/cache/apt/archives so they can be installed even without an Internet connection:
- OpenSSH server, rssh, NFS client & server, NBD client & server, Open-iSCSI
- Dnsmasq, PowerDNS recursor, Postfix, vsftpd
- MySQL client, smbc, smbnetfs
- Enigmail (not installed by default because dependencies for some locales are broken for Enigmail in the official repositories and this in turn breaks the Gnome language selector tool)
This was my first encounter with Linux Mint and it was a very nice experience. I'm not sure the community would be interested in this modified disc but in case somebody would like to host it, let me know, as I don't have enough bandwidth to make it available for download.