Mint Debian

[lwrver]

Has anyone else tried importing bookmarks from firefox in LM9 to firefox in LMDE? When I tried importing "bookmarks.html" from a thumb drive exported from LM9 it only imports a small part of the file. No indication of an error, it just doesn't copy the whole file. It looks like the file on the thumb drive is being locked after starting the import transfer of data. Could this be a bug??

[secipolla]

Firefox in Mint Debian is the one from Mozilla, just saying.

[lwrver]

Someone on the forum suggested using backup/restore instead of import/export. I followed that suggestion and it worked OK. Could also be an unexpected difference between the firefox versions, but results are what I'm interested in, and I'm good to go now for now.

[kmb42vt]

Has anyone else tried importing bookmarks from firefox in LM9 to firefox in LMDE? When I tried importing "bookmarks.html" from a thumb drive exported from LM9 it only imports a small part of the file. No indication of an error, it just doesn't copy the whole file. It looks like the file on the thumb drive is being locked after starting the import transfer of data. Could this be a bug??

Not too sure about importing a "bookmarks.html" file but I would suggest "Backing up" your LM9 bookmarks (produces a .json DB file) instead of exporting into a static .html and then "Restoring" the resulting .json file into LMDE's Firefox and see how that works. No reason I can think of that importing a bookmarks.html file from LM9 to LMDE should cause a problem though as I've done that between distros before. Could be the .html file became corrupted on your thumb drive?

For myself, I use the " -profilemanager" command switch to create Firefox and Thunderbird profiles that are external to the install directory. I usually have these created into a "Mozilla profiles" folder in my Home directory. That way I can just drag my "Mozilla profiles" folder from one distro to another and even to Windows and just use the " -profilemanager" command switch to point Firefox and Thunderbird to the correct profile folders and viola! All my settings, add-ons, bookmarks, tags, etc are restored.

[viking777]

Has anyone else tried importing bookmarks from firefox in LM9 to firefox in LMDE? When I tried importing "bookmarks.html" from a thumb drive exported from LM9 it only imports a small part of the file. No indication of an error, it just doesn't copy the whole file. It looks like the file on the thumb drive is being locked after starting the import transfer of data. Could this be a bug??

Why bother?

If you just copy the entire .mozilla folder from LM9 to LMDE you not only have your bookmarks but also history, cache, addons, preferences - everything in fact.

The only time that might not work is when there is a difference in versions between the two distros, but as LM9 and LMDE are contemporaries there is not much chance that will bother you.

It works for Opera too, and any other browser probably, though I only did it with Opera and FF but it works perfectly with those two.

[Anonymo]

Has anyone else tried importing bookmarks from firefox in LM9 to firefox in LMDE? When I tried importing "bookmarks.html" from a thumb drive exported from LM9 it only imports a small part of the file. No indication of an error, it just doesn't copy the whole file. It looks like the file on the thumb drive is being locked after starting the import transfer of data. Could this be a bug??

Why bother?

If you just copy the entire .mozilla folder from LM9 to LMDE you not only have your bookmarks but also history, cache, addons, preferences - everything in fact.

The only time that might not work is when there is a difference in versions between the two distros, but as LM9 and LMDE are contemporaries there is not much chance that will bother you.

It works for Opera too, and any other browser probably, though I only did it with Opera and FF but it works perfectly with those two.

Use xmarks

[darco]

Chromium bookmark syncing FTW!

[Gramps50]

LMDE Install

Let me preface this with the fact that I am not complaining about anything here this is just my observations as I installed LMDE and 1st started poking around. So far I really like what I have seen and I think Clem and the gang has done an excellent job in bringing us a new variant of Linux Mint.

I installed LMDE on my Dell Vostro 1520 laptop with 250GB hd & 4 gb ram

Used unetbootin to create a bootable USB thumb-drive.

Partitioner
Editing partitions is a little confusing, when clicking on Edit Partitions it opens gparted, so I formated the 2 existing partitons for reuse. Closed gparted and the installer still did not look correct. I then discovered that if you right click on the partition and set the mount point etc. After figuring this all out I continued only to have the installer freeze at about 75% with the message Mounting /dev/sda1/ on /target/ Canceled the installer and started over and all was well, might have had something to do with me using gparted the 1st run.

At 1st glance I don't think I would know the difference between LMDE & LM9 but upon further exploration I discovered that it did not handle font rendering as well as LM9. I have used Debian in the past and I believe that it's Debain not Mint causing the problem. I did change the default font from serif to FreeSerif and it did make a difference and looks better but still not great.

1st thing I do when installing any new distro is check for updated which I did using the mintUpdater. It told me there were 266 updates which I then installed. After they finished loading and installing I restarted, just in case, I like to restart when there are a lot of updates seems to eliminate problems down the road.

Now it's time to get my Broadcom 4812 working which is something I have to do with almost any distro that I have installed. I have a script that will download the proper modules and install them and it worked except for the last line which adds the command to load the driver upon booting. So I added it with sudo qedit and all was fine. The script is attached with comments for anyone that want to save time and automate the install.

When LMDE is booting you can see the lines as the different modules are loaded. This is fine with me, in LM9 this is hidden behind a splash screen.

Now it's time to install the extra programs that I want and use. Here a list of the ones that were available, followed by the ones that weren't
phatch
grsync
bluefish
gftp
dropbox
rubyripper
parcellite
gdebi - so .deb files could be installed, should be installed by default in my opinion.

Missing from the repostories
opera
picasa

downloaded and installed opera from the Opera site.

Found and connected to my network computer automatically.

I then went to Startup Application Preferences and unchecked the following as I don't use them.
Bluetooth
mintwelcome
Personal file sharing
Remote desktop
Visual Assistance
this is personal and has nothing to do with LMDE I do this to make the memory footprint smaller.

The only other issue I have come across so far and this is minor is with Thunderbird on the left column under the tab there is a bar that them sort of hides that top of the lettering on the column. If you click on the <> to change the view it disappears until you minimizes and the restore it,the bar returns. Doesn't seem to hurt the function it's just cosmetic.

I'm not sure if this is a debain issue or Opera, I tried to copy some text from Opera to Thunderbird and it would not copy. I was able to copy the same text from Firefox to Thunderbird. I actually think that it's an Opera issue, have had some other issues with it while running on other distros.

With all that said I really like what I am seeing. Being a Beta/RC1 LMDE is a very well done distro and I can only see it getting better with time and with a rolling release it will get better right before my vary eyes.

The code below is a script for installing the Broadcom 4812 drivers, tried to attach the script and it won't let me do it without a extension or with the .txt extension so I included it here. Copy and paste it into a text file, I named mine b43,be sure to make it excutable,put it in your home direcotry and run it from a terminal.

Code: Select all

#! /bin/bash
# Install the wifi drivers for Broadcom 4312 wifi
# Add contrib non-free to the app source list befor using - Note this may not
# be necessary on LMDE
############################################################################

## Update the list of available packages. Install the module-assistant and
##   wireless-tools packages:

   sudo aptitude update
   sudo aptitude install module-assistant wireless-tools

## Build and install a broadcom-sta-modules-* package for your system,
##   using Module-Assistant:

  sudo m-a a-i broadcom-sta

## Rebuild your initial ramdisk, to blacklist modules defined at
##   /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf within initramfs:

  sudo update-initramfs -u -k $(uname -r)

## Unload conflicting modules:

  sudo modprobe -r b44 b43 b43legacy ssb 

## Load the wl module:

  sudo modprobe wl 

## Verify your device has an available interface:

  sudo iwconfig

## Configure your wireless interface as appropriate. 

## At this point I don't think that the wl driver will load on startup so

sudo echo wl >> /etc/modules
   

[secipolla]

Opera

Code: Select all

#### Opera browser repositories
## Run this command: wget -O - http://deb.opera.com/archive.key | apt-key add -
# Opera Browser - Production release
deb http://deb.opera.com/opera/ squeeze non-free
# Opera Browser - Beta release
deb http://deb.opera.com/opera-beta/ squeeze non-free

Picasa

Code: Select all

#### Google Linux Software Repositories (testing) - http://www.google.com
## Run this command: wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | apt-key add - && apt-get update  
deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ testing non-free

Others that may interest

Code: Select all

#### E17 - http://enlightenment.org
## Run this command: wget -q http://packages.enlightenment.org/repo.key -O- | apt-key add -
deb http://packages.enlightenment.org/debian sid main extras

#### Google Linux Software Repositories - http://www.google.com < Chrome
## Run this command: wget -q -O - https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub | apt-key add - && apt-get update  
deb http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable non-free main

#### VirtualBox - http://www.virtualbox.org
## Run this command: wget -q http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian/oracle_vbox.asc -O- | apt-key add -
deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian squeeze non-free

#### Liquorix kernels
deb http://liquorix.net/debian sid main

[craig10x]

Mint Debian is just starting out and is really a research and development project at this point....fortunately many are installing it and that will help to smooth and polish it and fix the scores of things that people are finding....I can understand why they don't want to do other editions at this point because unless or until they can get the debian version to equal the main edition, there isn't much point to expand beyond the basic gnome and 32 bit one..

I ran the live cd for a while and had noticed lots of bugs...touchpad tap wasn't checked by default, deb files don't automatically install, some web pages, i found that everything won't load in on the page and the font rendering both in firefox and chrome is really bad at this point in the game...that is despite trying various setting changes...excellent font rendering is a very critical issue to me, as i do a lot of web surfing...and ubuntu and kubuntu have some of the best i have seen in many linux distros, so i am not surprised that ubuntu/kubuntu based distros look great in that regard...

So, what i am saying is aside from bugs, there are other things that Clem and the team will have to find and plug into the system to get it up to those standards we have become accustomed to enjoying in Mint...

I hope the project works out well in the long run...but i can see it will take a lot of work...both by the mint team and feedback from the mint community

[tdockery97]

Well, I decided to give LMDE a second chance and perform a real test. Virtualbox just doesn't get it. I installed to my hard drive about an hour ago, and everything worked out of the box. I had wifi and sound issues in Virtualbox, and those issues disappeared when I did a real install. So far it seems as solid as my Mint 9 Main install did, but much faster and more responsive. It's just a matter of doing things a little differently than in Mint 9, but so far it is AWSOME!

[kmb42vt]

@secipolla - Thanks for sharing the repos. I was looking for a way to install Google Earth as building wasn't working out that well (I'm a bit weak in that area but LMDE should provide a fine platform to learn on). Installed just fine once I added the Google Linux repo. Many thanks.

[bbmidi]

I installed LMDE as guest in my LM9 virtualbox. Except in the partitioning section where mounting/assigning root/home/etc is not so obvious all went well. I'm just quite surprise getting a lot of updates when update manager is run. For a newly released distro system i thought you get the newest and latest packages.

Had a bit of stall in installing VB guest additions as sudo dont work. Then i realized this is now debian and not ubuntu so i use su. It worked as expected.

Will be playing around with LMDE a little bit more. Then will decide if i will dual boot it with LM9.

Kudos to the LMDE team. I'm sure with much enthusiasm by the community the bugs will be ironed out in no time!

[Gramps50]

@secipolla Thanks for the links to the repros

[tdockery97]

After using LMDE for most of the day now, there is only one complaint. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't break it. I thought Mint 9 was stable. LMDE is well beyond my expections. It looks like LMDE will be my main desktop.

[Joylove]

Installed LMDE on an old 40gig HDD and had better video playback performance (can now use XV or XVMC since in LM9 I was stuck with X11).

Only problem was
-need to manually install the broadcom wireless driver (no hardware wizard)
-Synaptic's auto search wasn't functioning (until I checked for updates and applied patches)
-Grub2 menu has a blue vga menu portion on top of the Linux Mint wallpaper

Anyway I applied all patches (including level 4 and 5) and now I can't boot into the GUI. Tried to boot via recovery but after entering the root password and startx, I got stuck on a black screen.

Also during install I wasn't prompted where to assign the swap (made one up via gparted though along with the root and home partition)

[craig10x]

apparently direct debian has a reputation for crappy font rendering (as compared to ubuntu and kubuntu which is not quite as good as windows but far superior to debian direct)...read this year old post from the debian forums:
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=46550
Mint Team TAKE NOTE!!!

[msuggs]

There is often a debate around font rendering and I've always found it a fairly subjective experience. I quite dislike the font rendering in Ubuntu.

[shayney]

Still playing around with it and generally impressed.
Still no major problems so far.

One thing I was slightly sceptical about is the claims a mint debian system is better speed and performance wise.
Although I know from running testing before that it is better than ubuntu and mint in that respect, I figured with extra mint tools and any other system startup stuff added by mint (I haven't looked into what those might be) it would probably be much the same.

Turns out resource-wise it is using much less (like, 50-75mb less depending what I'm doing).
No really noticeable difference speed wise but then ubuntu and mint both run very snappy on my comp.
Resource usage isn't really an issue for me since I have plenty of RAM and a pretty fast laptop and have never even come close to using half it's RAM but for those with older comps or those who find their comps struggling with ubuntu or mint may well love this.

I think it will be a while before I am using this as my main system though. I want to spend a while really pushing it and seeing how it holds up and what bugs (if any) rear their heads.

So enough rambling, I have a question now:
Does anyone know if ubuntu mavericks unity/netbook interface will make it back to debian?
I'm playing around with gnome-shell on mint debian and starting to like it but I still fancy unity.

[tdockery97]

I've noticed it to be 50% faster opening and closing windows and apps than Isadora did on my laptop, and cpu down about 20% on the average.