Just installed LMDE, Got it up and running, but...

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jehicks87

Just installed LMDE, Got it up and running, but...

Post by jehicks87 »

My Netbook is an Acer Aspire One 523h. atom 455 1.6 ghz, 1 gb ram. HDD should be unimportant, but it's a 5400 160gb Hitachi.

Now...

My computer is actually booting, running, and opening apps slower than it does with windows 7 starter. My mousepad requires a heavier touch, and already has given me multiple times where instead of a double-click it requires a tripple-quadruple-whatever click. Is this what I can expect from LMDE or am I just doing something wrong? How do I speed things up and get the mouse sensitivity back to normal?

Aside from that, EVERYTHING LOOKS CLUNKY!!! What the heck, man? Firefox looks like it's made out of lego's (very boxy) my cursor is tiny and when I go to click on something it's this weird pointer-finger thingy, and overall the whole thing is just unattractive. Please forgive my inexperience, I am a complete newb to Linux. This is my first distro get actually get working. If I upgrade the "theme" will it give everything a make-over, to include my apps and windows? If not, what will?

Again, sorry for seeming so... just... dumb. But I am completely lost here. I WANT to make this work, but if there's no performance upgrade (read: less tax on the system) then I don't see much of a reason to stick with this. But I WANT it to work. Did I mention that already? :D

Thank you so much in advance for your help.

Jake
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libssd
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Re: Just installed LMDE, Got it up and running, but...

Post by libssd »

I'm surprised, as LMDE runs quite nicely on my AA1 D150, a slightly older model. I have a test installation on an 8gb SDHC card, which is a pretty slow medium, and performance is good. LMDE fonts aren't quite as attractive as Ubuntu 10.04, but overall, everything works, and I notice no difference in the trackpad.

Just to be clear, have you INSTALLED LMDE in a new partition, or are you running it from a DVD? Running any Linux distro from DVD will be quite slow. I would offer some additional comments, but I have misplaced my SDHC, so I'm not running LMDE at the moment.
jehicks87

Re: Just installed LMDE, Got it up and running, but...

Post by jehicks87 »

Yes, it's installed. I also made a swap partition... but I don't know if it's actually "working" as a swap partition right now...
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tdockery97
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Re: Just installed LMDE, Got it up and running, but...

Post by tdockery97 »

Go to Menu>System Tools>System Monitor and check the Resources tab. You can see if it is recognizing your swap partition.
Mint Cinnamon 20.1
jehicks87

Re: Just installed LMDE, Got it up and running, but...

Post by jehicks87 »

tdockery97 wrote:Go to Menu>System Tools>System Monitor and check the Resources tab. You can see if it is recognizing your swap partition.
It's not. On my install, I made an extended partition with 1gb of the partition a swap partition... the rest of it was my logical drive. How do I make it recognize/utilize my swap?
darco
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Re: Just installed LMDE, Got it up and running, but...

Post by darco »

Check your fstab file to see if it includes a swap line e.g. /dev/sdb3 none swap sw 0 0
If so, then in a terminal run the swapon -a command
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rivenathos
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Re: Just installed LMDE, Got it up and running, but...

Post by rivenathos »

On a side note, depending on your video card, the "libgl1-mesa-dri" package may be necessary. You can install that via Synaptic. If you have Intel GMA 500 video, that is a whole different ballgame. The output of your lspci would be helpful.
Current hardware: a Dell OptiPlex 3010 desktop, a Dell Inspiron 531 desktop, and a Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop.
Current OS: LMDE 3
oOarthurOo

Re: Just installed LMDE, Got it up and running, but...

Post by oOarthurOo »

How on earth did you install it? As a self-professed linux newb you probably should've just let the installer do what it wanted with your hard-drive. If you want to do it yourself do:
20GB ext4 / noatime
therest ext4 /home relatime
1.2 GB swap

Don't make anything extended or logical or anything like that.

As for using swap now, fdisk -l to show you what your current disk labels are... assuming your swap is the fourth partition it'd be something like
swapon /dev/sda4

the clunky appearance suggests you're missing some gtk-engines, which suggests you did a minimal install. If that's the case, just reinstall and let the installer take care of everything. When it gets to task sel make sure you check desktop and standard and laptop.
jehicks87

Re: Just installed LMDE, Got it up and running, but...

Post by jehicks87 »

oOarthurOo wrote:How on earth did you install it? As a self-professed linux newb you probably should've just let the installer do what it wanted with your hard-drive. If you want to do it yourself do:
20GB ext4 / noatime
therest ext4 /home relatime
1.2 GB swap

Don't make anything extended or logical or anything like that.

As for using swap now, fdisk -l to show you what your current disk labels are... assuming your swap is the fourth partition it'd be something like
swapon /dev/sda4

the clunky appearance suggests you're missing some gtk-engines, which suggests you did a minimal install. If that's the case, just reinstall and let the installer take care of everything. When it gets to task sel make sure you check desktop and standard and laptop.
I did let the installer do the work. When it asked for partitions, I set 24 gb aside for logical and 1 gb aside for swap. When Gparted came up I tried to set two different partitions, but it wouldn't let me (acer's harddrive already comes with three partitions on it in the first place. Gparted would only allow me to set up one additional... i.e. four total.) So to get around that and to have a swap partition, i created an extended partition and set up a swap in there. The logical partition is ext4 formatted, the swap is "linux swap format" formatted... all done through the installer. Other than the partitioning and formatting choices, which I had to make based on what the installer was telling me, everything else is straight as it came from the live cd that I downloaded directly off of the linuxmint website. I'm not naive enough to think I know enough to go about changing default setting and such; that's why I came here for help.

Thanks for letting me know how to turn the swap on also! That's really helpful. :)

Besides all that, once I've moved all my important files over from the windows partition, I'm going to wipe that part of the disk clean and gobble that space up for my OS and filesys. More harddrive space should speed it up... at least I think so, right? That's how it works in windows at least...

EDIT: swap is now on. I really like this whole "command line" thing. :D
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tdockery97
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Re: Just installed LMDE, Got it up and running, but...

Post by tdockery97 »

jehicks87 wrote:EDIT: swap is now on. I really like this whole "command line" thing. :D
Yes, isn't it nice to have such direct control over your system?
Mint Cinnamon 20.1
jehicks87

Re: Just installed LMDE, Got it up and running, but...

Post by jehicks87 »

tdockery97 wrote:
jehicks87 wrote:EDIT: swap is now on. I really like this whole "command line" thing. :D
Yes, isn't it nice to have such direct control over your system?
Yes, and no. I'll tell you what: it is NOT a plug-and-play OS like Windows or Mac. But I must be a masochist... cause I like it. :lol:

It still does look clunky, which I'm attempting to fix, and I'm trying to figure out how to reclaim some space I freed up from windows, but it won't let me resize my partition without unmounting it and it won't let me unmount it while I'm using that partition... so idk what to do there.

Currently, I'm installing Skype. I followed the directions posted on the forums, but some packages were still missing so I had to run around and find/install them. It's kinda frustrating and kinda fun all at the same time. :)

Oh, and I fixed the mouse problem for the most part by adjusting the sensitivity and double-click dwell time. As far as running cooler/quicker that's pretty much fixed itself... idk what the issue was to begin with but it's not making a fuss now. With all this command-line stuff though, I may have found my excuse to buy a new netbook/ultraportable. I head MSI and Lenovo have very nice keyboards ;)
AK Dave

Re: Just installed LMDE, Got it up and running, but...

Post by AK Dave »

jehicks87 wrote:I'm trying to figure out how to reclaim some space I freed up from windows, but it won't let me resize my partition without unmounting it and it won't let me unmount it while I'm using that partition... so idk what to do there.
Boot whatever you used to install in the first place: CD, LiveCD, pendrive, LiveUSB, DVD, etc. Use gparted from that to handle the partition resize.
oOarthurOo

Re: Just installed LMDE, Got it up and running, but...

Post by oOarthurOo »

My computer is actually booting, running, and opening apps slower than it does with windows 7 starter.
5400 is a pretty slow hard-drive. Based on what I've seen of the /etc/init.d directory on a default mint install (another thread) you'd likely benefit from installing readahead-fedora

Code: Select all

aptitude install readahead-fedora
After installing reboot once and do nothing until GDM. Then log in quick as a mouse and do nothing for about 2 minutes. Then reboot. Things should be a bit quicker than prior to its installation.
My mousepad requires a heavier touch, and already has given me multiple times where instead of a double-click it requires a tripple-quadruple-whatever click. Is this what I can expect from LMDE or am I just doing something wrong? How do I speed things up and get the mouse sensitivity back to normal?
In addition to the standard mouse settings options, I've grown to love gpointing-device-settings. Again, just:

Code: Select all

aptitude install gpointing-device-settings
Aside from that, EVERYTHING LOOKS CLUNKY!!! What the heck, man? Firefox looks like it's made out of lego's (very boxy) my cursor is tiny and when I go to click on something it's this weird pointer-finger thingy, and overall the whole thing is just unattractive.
Do this:

Code: Select all

aptitude search gtk2-engines
At a minimum, you should have an "i" beside gtk2-engines and gtk2-engines-pixbuf .. some other popular ones are aurora and murrine. Then, in addition to an engine, you need a theme. Here's some more tips:

Code: Select all

arthur@nixpad:~$ aptitude search cursor-theme
p   chameleon-cursor-theme                                                           - a modern but not gaudy X11 mouse theme                                                     
i   dmz-cursor-theme                                                                 - Style neutral, scalable cursor theme                                                       
p   moblin-cursor-theme                                                              - moblin cursor theme                                                                        
p   xcursor-themes                                                                   - Base X cursor theme

Code: Select all

arthur@nixpad:~$ aptitude search icon-theme
i A faenza-icon-theme                                                                - Faenza Icon Theme                                                                          
p   gnome-brave-icon-theme                                                           - blue variation of the GNOME-Colors icon theme                                              
p   gnome-dust-icon-theme                                                            - chocolate variation of the GNOME-Colors icon theme                                         
p   gnome-human-icon-theme                                                           - orange variation of the GNOME-Colors icon theme                                            
i A gnome-icon-theme                                                                 - GNOME Desktop icon theme                                                                   
p   gnome-icon-theme-blankon                                                         - BlankOn icon theme for GTK+ 2.x                                                            
p   gnome-icon-theme-dlg-neu                                                         - Dropline Gnome Neu icon theme for GTK+ 2.x                                                 
p   gnome-icon-theme-extras                                                          - GNOME Desktop icon theme (additional icons)                                                
p   gnome-icon-theme-gartoon                                                         - Gartoon icon theme for GTK+ 2.x                                                            
p   gnome-icon-theme-nuovo                                                           - Dropline Nuovo icon theme for GTK+ 2.x                                                     
p   gnome-icon-theme-suede                                                           - Suede icon theme for GTK+ 2.x                                                              
p   gnome-icon-theme-symbolic                                                        - GNOME Desktop icon theme (symbolic icons)                                                  
p   gnome-icon-theme-yasis                                                           - YASIS (Yet Another Scalable Icon Set)                                                      
p   gnome-illustrious-icon-theme                                                     - pink variation of the GNOME-Colors icon theme                                              
p   gnome-noble-icon-theme                                                           - purple variation of the GNOME-Colors icon theme                                            
p   gnome-wine-icon-theme                                                            - red variation of the GNOME-Colors icon theme                                               
p   gnome-wise-icon-theme                                                            - green variation of the GNOME-Colors icon theme                                             
i A hicolor-icon-theme                                                               - default fallback theme for FreeDesktop.org icon themes                                     
p   human-icon-theme                                                                 - Human Icon theme                                                                           
p   lxde-icon-theme                                                                  - LXDE Standard icon theme                                                                   
p   moblin-icon-theme                                                                - moblin icon theme                                                                          
p   nuvola-icon-theme                                                                - Nuvola icon theme                                                                          
p   oxygen-icon-theme                                                                - Oxygen icon theme                                                                          
p   tangerine-icon-theme                                                             - Tangerine Icon theme                                                                       
i   tango-icon-theme                                                                 - Tango icon theme      

Please forgive my inexperience, I am a complete newb to Linux. This is my first distro get actually get working. If I upgrade the "theme" will it give everything a make-over, to include my apps and windows? If not, what will?
As a dude, I never forgive, but frequently forget. Right-click on your desktop and chose change background, then the theme tab, try a few, hit apply, open some apps, try another. I like clearlooks, then mess with the colours a bit by hitting customize, then change the window border, then change the icons, then change the mouse theme, ad inifinty ad nauseum.

Here's what it currently looks like:
Image

So... you can make it whatever you want. Prettier than macs or uglier than windows. It's up to you.
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darethehair
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Re: Just installed LMDE, Got it up and running, but...

Post by darethehair »

oOarthurOo wrote: In addition to the standard mouse settings options, I've grown to love gpointing-device-settings. Again, just:

Code: Select all

aptitude install gpointing-device-settings
.
Yesterday, I got frustrated that the 'mythfrontend' of my Mint 9 desktop would not talk properly to the 'mythfrontend' of my LMDE mythbackend, so I decided that it was time to make the big jump and convert my desktop to LMDE as well. The install went very well, but 'apt-get dist-upgrade' took a *long* time to complete -- there are tonnes of packages that needed to be updated since 201101 was released.

In any case, two annoyances that I immediately ran into were:

1) Clicking a web link inside a Thunderbird email would invoke some bizarre non-Firefox web browser. I had to use the 'Preferred Applications' and guess what my 'custom' substitute was going to be ('/opt/firefox/firefox %s')

and

2) Most annoyingly, my Logitech NX80 mouse -- which lacks a middle mouse button, but was somehow detected as having it -- was painful to use with cut&paste until I could figure out a way to bring it to some sort of 3-button-emulation. I finally stumbled across 'gpointing-device-settings', and then it was easy. What I don't understand is why the included mouse configuration apps couldn't handle this? Rather than making a new posting, I thought I should mention it in this thread, since 'gpointing-device-settings' had already been mentioned :)
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