I've tinkered with lm9deb for the past couple of days. Unfortunately for me, I have more problems than praise with this LM release.
For the praise, Clem and everyone else involved have done an awesome job with the usual Linux Mint polish. On the few occasions that I could get lm9deb to work properly, it was fast as heck, and used minimal memory. Mine was running a little under 200 Mb's at idle. I expect that once the rough edges are rounded out, lm9deb will be another great addition to the Linux Mint family. Sadly, this is one that I can't use just yet.
As noted above, I've had more problems with this install than any other Linux Mint version to date. After my third install, and a new download from another site, I can get to the Desktop, but can't do anything with it.
My observations during the three installs:
During my second install, even though I had set my /home partition to be ext3, it was installed as ext4. / installed as ext3 as requested. With a new image, and the third install, /home still installed as ext4, even though I made sure that it was set to install as ext3, and to be formatted as such.
The install partitioner is not consistent in how it sees the drives. During my first two installs, it saw my OS/Distro drive as sda. During the third install with the new image, it saw it as sdc. No changes have been made to my system, beyond the installation of lm9deb.
The installed time is not correct. Time locale was set to United States, New York. After install and reboot, system shows time as 4 hours behind my current time. LiveDVD showed the correct time while being used.
After install, and rebooting, came up with the following errors:
1. Could not update ICEauthority file /home/ryan-lm9deb/.ICEauthority
2. There is a problem with the configuration server (/usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconf-sanity-check-2 exited with status 256)
3. The panel encountered a problem while loading, OAFIID:GNOME_mintMenu, Do you want to delete applet from your configuration?
4. Nautilus could not create the following required folders: /home/ryan-lm9deb/Desktop, /home/ryan-lm9deb/.nautilus
After running through all of these error messages, the presented Desktop had no menu button, and no desktop icons. However, Network was able to connect, and I was able to do updates from the shield icon in the task bar.
During my first and second installs, I would encounter all of the above messages, but if I did a hard reboot, none of the error messages would show up the next time, and everything would appear on the Desktop as it should. If I did a hard reboot again, the errors would show up again. With my third install, every reboot shows the above messages, and I am unable to use Linux Mint.
For the hardware curious, I'm running the following;
CPU – AMD Phenom II x6 1090T 3.2Ghz
Heatsink/Fan – Scythe SCKBT-1000 Kabuto
Motherboard – Gigabyte GA-890GPA-UD3H
Memory – 6 Gb Corsair XMS3 DDR3
Video Card – EVGA GeForce GTX470
TV Card – Hauppage HVR-1800
I/O Flex 5 Port PCI Host Controller
Dynex Multicard Reader
Lite-On DVD Drive
1 Seagate 250 Gb
1 Seagate 500 Gb
4 Western Digital 1 Tb
Since Daryna, I've always been eager to install the latest Linux Mint release candidate, and have always been happy. Unfortunately, I guess this time around I'll have to exercise some patience, and stick with lm9x64 for awhile longer. But I have no doubt that when Clem and the others have gone through this release with a fine tooth comb, this Debian release is going to stand the Linux world on its head.
*****EDIT*****
i believe that I have solved the issues that I had above. It appears to be a permissions problem with the /home folder after install. When I did an ls of /home/ryan-lm9deb, and then just /home, nothing showed in the directory. So I ended up having to do the following:
Ctrl+Alt+F3 from the partial Desktop
Enter login name and password at prompts
sudo chown user:user /home
sudo chmod 644 /home
sudo chown -R /home
Ctrl+Alt+F7
Reboot
I have restarted, and shut down several times, and have not had the errors reappear yet. It appears that I now have a functioning lm9deb.
