Hello, Joel.
Glad to learn that you solved the wireless adapter mystery.
State of Wireless Adapter
Telling from my own experience the wireless adapter will have the status in which Windows left it behind when Mint boots up. - As you expected it, too.
Maybe the behaviour of the <FN><F11> key is specific to your machine. I cannot really tell. - I remember though a few old Asus machines where the <Alt><F2> key had to be pressed once after each reboot, because the adapter would switch off automatically.
About the missing visual feedback. My Acer Aspire One D260 lacks a little LED which might give a visual feedback on the status of the wireless adapter. Yet, after logging in to the xfce desktop I will be able to tell from the network manager icon left of the mintUpdate shield icon whether wireless is available (adapter on), because if the machine has got no network connection at all the network manager icon will be grayed out.
If the wireless adapter is on then a popup in the upper righthand corner will be displayed for a few seconds telling me that the connection to my router has been established.
Removing the First Mint 15 Mate Installation and Keeping the Recent One
In order to remove the older Mint 15 Mate installation, it will be necessary to identify beyond doubt
+ which disk partitions exist
+ what their names are in Linux terms and
+ which disk partitio holds which operating system.
Of course there are several ways to achieve this goal. But as a programme named GParted will be used later on to release the disk partition(s) where the old Mint 15 Mate installation lives, we as well use GParted in order to get a detailled overview of the existing disk partitions.
Ironically, GParted will be present and used during the Mint installation. But at the end, the installer will remove it. So you will have to re-install it now.
There are at least two ways of installing GParted:
Either you use Synaptic package manager, locate gparted in the software list, select it for installation and click [Apply].
Or you use the commandline and execute these 2 commands in the given order:
Code: Select all
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gparted
Once the installation has finished the GParted icon should be found in [Menu] => System => GParted or [Menu] => System Management => GParted. - Launching GParted will require root privileges, i.e. you will be prompted to enter your password in order to launch GParted with root privileges.
What will the GParted output look like on a machine that comes with
(1) Windows 7 as its primary operating system
(2) Linux Mint as its second operating system (old installation)
(3) Linux Mint as its third operating system (new installation)?
There is a machine here which has got a pretty similar layout:
(1) Windows 7 as its primary operating system
(2) Ubuntu as its second operating system
(3) Linux Mint as its third operating system
This machine will be used to illustrate what to expect and how to interpret what GParted displays.
[rimg]http://i.imgur.com/CPjrsUz.png[/rimg]
(GParted picture of disk holding 3 Windows 7 partitions and 4 Linux partitions)
The Windows partitions can be identified easily. Their "File System" type is NTFS.
The 3 Linux partitions can be identified easily, too. Thier "File System" type is EXT4.
The 4th Linux partition has got the "File System" type "linxu-swap". It is the swap partition.
The GParted image displays only 1 entry in the column "Mount Point":
/.
This means that only the partition /dev/sda6 is currently mounted on the mount point /. This is the root filesystem of the currently active Linux system.
And because there are no other active mount points the whole Linux system seems to live in the root filesystem.
In this case it is easy to identify which Linux partition
not to touch with GParted now: /dev/sda6.
Yet, how to verify this is really the currently booted Linux system?
Open a terminal window and execute this command:
The result here is:
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$ mount
/dev/sda6 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
none on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw)
none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw)
udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620)
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755)
none on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=5242880)
none on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
binfmt_misc on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev)
gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/karl/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=karl)
/dev/sde1 on /media/INTENSO type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,uid=1000,gid=1000,shortname=mixed,dmask=0077,utf8=1,showexec,flush,uhelper=udisks)
A bit confusing, isn't it?
What you are looking for are mounted disk partitions.
As can be told from the GParted screenshot, all disk partitions start with the string "/dev/sd". (You will notice soon, why I did not say "/dev/sda".)
So look for mounted disk partitions in the screen output of the mount command:
There result on the machine here is:
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mount | grep "/dev/sd"
/dev/sda6 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro)
/dev/sde1 on /media/INTENSO type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,uid=1000,gid=1000,shortname=mixed,dmask=0077,utf8=1,showexec,flush,uhelper=udisks)
Oops.
Only a few lines above I had stated that GParted had shown only /dev/sda6 were mounted on /.
Now it can be seen /dev/sde1 is mounted on /media/INTENSO, too.
How comes?
The answer is trivial:
As can be seen GParted will always only check one physical disk at a time. And it has checked the internal harddisk /dev/sda.
This is why the screenshot does not display anything about /dev/sde1.
Yet, no reason for alarm in this case: /dev/sde1 is of type "vfat", no Linux filesystem. - It is a USB pendrive attached to the machine. It can be safely ignored.
Conclusion:
If we wanted to remove the older Linux installation on this machine, we could tell GParted to format the partition on /dev/sda5 e.g.
I hope I did not create too much confusion.
I would like to ask you
+ to boot into the newer Linux Mint 15 installation
+ to create a GParted screenshot on your EKT mini notebook and post it here.
+ to post the output of the mount command.
Both together should help find out which partitions not too modify or remove in any case and which one(s) can be re-formatted in order to remove the older Linux Mint installation.
Kind regards,
Karl