I have used Xandros Linux for 6 years. I'm also a mod on the forums there. Unfortunately they haven't updated in a while, so I decided to move along with another surplus donated machine. I installed Mint "Gloria" this morning on a pentium M 1.6, 1 GB Ram laptop. I had earlier tried Ubuntu 8, 9.04, Kubuntu 9.04, Mepis, and a couple of uninspiring others. Haven't found the 'buntus to my liking. This one I found this one to be very good out of the box. I installed virtualbox with winxp pro and several window$ only progs in there. Set up of everything was pretty smooth. The only challenge was skype. I could not get sound to work with either the microphone or speakers until I went to a console and ran alsamixer and then set the input to "pulse" (whatever that is!), Everything else simply seems to work.
I even found a usb conexant modem
Code: Select all
Bus 003 Device 003: ID 0572:1324 Conexant Systems (Rockwell), Inc.
was detected and automagically installed to
/dev/ttyACM0 , which no other distro could do. Mint must have brand new drivers for modems.
From the kde experience with Xandros, the things I haven't quite figured out with this gnome-based desktop are if there is a GUI to list active processes and maybe to select and kill/terminate a program, and I'm having a bit of trouble finding the other computers (4 of them Linux, 2 windows) in this mixed wired/wireless network. I can see the Mint laptop from the others (all Xandros 4.1), but the Mint computer does not see any of the others.
I'd say overall, this is probably a keeper, as long as I can figure out the network 'seeing other computers' thing.