Linux Mint Forums

Hi all,

I'm new to Linux these last two months and I'm a novice computer user (Windows). During the last two months I've tried the latest releases of PCBSD, Ubuntu and fedora and all were pretty good. However, I didn't like the Unity desktop of Ubuntu and fedora had some periodic crashes that I didn't experience with PCBSD and Ubuntu. fedora didn't support playback of commercial DVDs out of the box and I was unable to get it to work. Linux Mint had none of those difficulties and the Mate desktop is great. I got the printer for my Brother MFC-8860DN machine working without difficulty by experimenting with several of the preinstalled CUPS Brothers drivers until it worked correctly. The only thing I can't do with LinuxMint (so far) that I can with Windows is use the scan capability of my Brother MFC-8860. The Brother Support web page does offer linux drivers for scan but they were not completely clear to me. I didn't want to ruin anthing with root privileges until I did some more reading.

The only difficulty I had with LinuxMint that I didn't have with PCBSD, Ubuntu and fedora was during installation. I did not want to put Windows and Linux on the same hard drive; hard drive failure kills both. I installed a second hard drive and use the Intel boot menu at computer startup to choose which hard drive to boot from. During installation PCBSD, Ubuntu and fedora all saw the second hard drive and offered the option for a default install on that drive; LinuxMint did not. LinuxMint offered to install along side Windows or overwrite windows but not to install on the second drive (which at the time contained fedora). The third option LinuxMint offered was to do everything myself and unfortunately the user's guide didn't help. I finally figured out that I needed to create partitions for /boot, /, swap, and /home and found some general linux guidance about the recommended sizes of those partitions. Not sure I made the best choices or used the best patition types for each, but the installation proceeded and everything worked without a hitch. No crashes, boots fast, and the applications work great.

Greetings,
Tony

welcome to the Mint family forums.

i am surprise simple scan didn't work [it dose in most cases] as for choosing which drive to install this can be done in the drop down box at partitioning stage [but you need to be able to recognise which is which]

wizard

Thanks for the welcome.

simple scan and xsane didn't find my Brother MFC-8860DN scanner on any of the linux distributions I tried but it was found when I used the command line search "find-scanner" (?). The sane web site inidcates that Brother models are not supported. I shouldn't have any trouble with it though since others have successfully used the Brother supplied scan drivers for linux. I'll give that a try shortly.

At the LM partitioning screen during installation LinuxMint did not offer an option for default partitioning to my second drive. There was definitely a drop down menu for my second (non windows) hard drive but the installer would not apply a default LM partitioning for that drive. I had to do it manually. Keep in mind that I'm a newbie and could have done something wrong but the installer parttioning screen for Ubuntu and fedora were very similar. They offered four install options: install LM along side windows, overwrite windows, install default partitions on the second drive or do something else. MintLinux did not offer the option to install a default partition on the second drive even when I selected the second hard drive in the drop down menu. Again as a newbie I undoubtedly did something wrong.

The upside of the install problem was it forced me to learn. After about 30 minutes of reading and the intuitive partioner in the LM installer I got it going.

Regards,
Tony

Welcome aboard! Glad to hear you got it all setup!

Good day and welcome to Linux Mint,

Hope you will enjoy it as much as we do.