Mint Debian

[Oscar799]

Hello Binx,
I am running LMDE as a dual-boot with Mint 9 main edition on a Lenovo G550 and it has been running without any problems since I installed it yesterday

[HaTeMe]

You can load the nVidia Drivers from their Website too but remember that hey can be unstable.

For me they running much better, have always Problems with the Drivers in the Repos (Main & KDE CE).

Hope the new Iso is comming soon, cant wait.

[Binx]

Hello Binx,
I am running LMDE as a dual-boot with Mint 9 main edition on a Lenovo G550 and it has been running without any problems since I installed it yesterday

Thanks oscar799 i'll be installing it tomorrow morning.

[Theologian]

I like Linux Mint, just a little ashamed that it's ubuntu based.

I don't see what's so shameful about LinuxMint being based on perhaps the most successful & popular Linux-based distro.
For many, Ubuntu is the entrance to the world of Linux: it certainly was for me. I consider LinuxMInt to be 'Ubuntu+++', & recommend it to would be 'verts' (pun intended): two successes so far, both very happy.

The resentment towards Ubuntu seems largely sour grapes relating to its success, & I find it utterly b-anal & absurd when Ubuntu/Canonical is virtually equated with M$. If the 'hegemony' of M$ is going to be challenged or subverted, Ubuntu is probably the most likely candidate. And yes, aggressive marketing may be necessary.
Arguably, there's too much divergence & air-headedness, & too little integrity in 'Linuxspace' for any other 'free' distro to be able to make that challenge. I find it quite hypocritical that many 'Linux' websites are emblazoned with ads pushing products that are only compatible with M$W.
Is the idea of a Linux-based distro that's more than a personal vanity too much to comprehend?

Anyone who feels ashamed about or resents the Ubuntu base of LinuxMint is FREE to stop using it immediately, examine their sense of personal integrity & ethics, & decide whether or not compromise is acceptable. I know where I stand.

Since Ubuntu seems to be becoming more singular/restricted (e.g. only Ubuntu & Kubuntu have LTS status/APTonCD is not included in the official version/APTonCDs made on Isadora are not accepted by Lucid (IMExp)/Remastersys will not install on Lucid (IMExp)/etc.) perhaps LinuxMint could look for another base, Debian (as its root) being the most obvious.
However it is not necessarily inevitable, for the simple fact that anyone is free to take an existing Ubuntu, customise it, change its name & hey-presto, a 'new' distro.
While Ubuntu have quite rightly stopped misuse of its name by the producers of sectarian versions, I've not seen anything about them attempting to ban the use of Ubuntu as a base.
If anything, a more 'restricted' Ubuntu expands the field for LinuxMInt to produce a 'freer' Ubuntu-based distro, even to have more specifically focused versions - e.g. 'home'/'office'/'netbook'/'server'/'professional'/'student'/'entertainment'/'programmer'/'truck driver'/'space tourist'/etc.
The fact is, unlike most 'Linuxers', many people DO want a 'standardised' distro on a platter (pun intended), & the producers of distros need to accept this fact.

From Freedom came Elegance.

Please don't throw that away.

[Robin]

The resentment towards Ubuntu seems largely sour grapes relating to its success ...

I respectfully disagree. My own "resentment" has to do with Canonical's insistence on putting buggy, beta software in a distro that is supposed to be "newbie friendly." Software that gives even experienced Linux users fits - what do you think a newbie will do?

If Lucid had been my first attempt at Linux, I would have wrestled with it for no more than a day before going back to Windows. I might not even look for another Linux distro because Ubuntu is supposed to be - according to most of the stuff you find in a Google serach - the best beginner's distro there is. If the "best" beginner's distro is that bad, why even try any other?

I'll simply continue to use Mint8 Xfce until it is no longer supported, and hope that by then LMDE (Xfce?) will be ready for prime time on my machine. But having wrestled with Xubuntu 10.04 for long enough to give up on it, I'm not inclined to use any version of Ubuntu or anything built on Ubuntu after Karmic.

It has nothing to do with sour grapes. It has been, up 'til now, awesome, and I'm grateful for the start I got in Linux because of Ubuntu and Mint.

-R

[secipolla]

I just wanted to add that if you need the older legacy nvidia driver (I needed the 96.43.18 for example)
there is a great script for that called smxi. you can find out more Here
Cheers,
Deadguy

Or if you need the latest drivers (better for newer cards).

[GoustiFruit]

Anyone tried to use wifi drivers through ndiswrapper ? For some reason my USB adapter is not recognized ("VIA Networking VT6656 USB-Wireless LAN Adapter") and the ndiswrapper thing doesn't work either :-\

[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!