Review: Linux Mint 19 "Tara"

Since I changed jobs and no longer use my big Linux box day to day, it's been harder to find the time to work with Linux, and in particular Mint. I love Mint and I've been delighted to use it for many years now. When I took my work PC home, and fired it up I was poignantly reminded how much I enjoyed working in the Linux desktop world and how I'd missed it. Windows 10 just doesn't compare and even Mac OS X (while very good) still lacked a certain something.

I've been using Mint 18 for some time and enjoyed it, so when I finally caught up to checking out "Tara" I was very interested to see what the go is. Here is the link to the release blog post about it: https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3597 It's a Long Term release (LTS) so it'll be good until 2023. I've found Mint to be updated and looked after for the full term of their LTS releases - something to commend the team on. Now, what to run the test install on?

I managed to get my hands on a 4 year old HP ENVY TouchSmart Ultrabook (or "Sleekbook" 14-k124tx is the model) for this review. It's stats are fairly impressive for an older machine: Intel Core i7-4500U, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD drive. It has a touch screen, and dual video adaptors (low power Intel and nVidia for the good times), and multi touch mouse pad. This one had a dodgy Windows 7 install on it that kept blue screening, even with a fresh install of Windows 7. I've been running Mint as my primary workstation on it for several days now with nary a worry.

Into the review then:

I booted into the LiveUSB version of Mint for a quick poke around. Everything looked the goods so I chose "Install".

The installation of Mint was flawless - it identified the UEFI nature of the boot system, and asked if I wanted to change it around, or was I happy to blow away the previous install and just go with Mint. I let it get rid of Windows and move through the familiar installation process taking the default options for everything. I like how it is specific about the encryption option for the disk leading to a more secure install.

First boot was not long after and very fast - particularly on this rather lean little machine.

The initial impression was that the presentation of the desktop environment was polished and had the usual, rather plain theme applied. I'm more than happy with this though as I find too much flash gets in the way of doing what I need to. The new crop of desktop backgrounds are lovely - lots of colour and sharp imagery to enjoy. It was very fast too - launching Firefox took mere moments and everything was quick.

I was delighted to see the operating system ask me if I wanted to set up backups when I first tried to run Mint Update. This is a very clever idea and uses a built in wizard to run the flamboyantly named "Backup Tool". Not only will this use rsync to back up one's files, but it will also backup your software selection (and restore both groups of files as required). Given this computer is a test bed and I expect to mess around with it a fair bit, I didn't bother setting it up. The initial update was smooth and a quick reboot got me back into a fully patched machine.

Uh oh though - no wireless! Aargh! This machine has some fairly specialised hardware and requires some third party apps. I've found this to be hit and miss at times in the past, but found it to be no real issue here:

In the background you can see one of the superb "Tara" backgrounds. Everything works now - WiFi and the nVidia drivers as well. I'm not sure if there really is a boost in the graphics as I'm only doing desktop stuff on it (and even then mostly web based activities) so check out a gamer's review for that sort of thing.

Another quick reboot (now up to 3) and good to go. Installed Chromium, nmap and a few other bits and bobs and all good. Mint is effortless to manage apps with - much like Debian and Ubuntu and this is a big part of the reason I like it.

The install base wasn't huge either. On a laptop like this, where a Windows 10 install can smash a 128GB disk in no time, the disk usage looks like this:

You can see that it's only 11GB for the whole install, and applications (and also my imaginative naming scheme for computers!).

With regards to usability and stability - Mint offers the usual round of suspects for desktop productivity - LibreOffice, VLC, Transmission, Firefox and the like. In the last few days of using Mint on this machine, there have been zero issues, no failures, no stoppages. This is on a machine recently removed from our fleet for stability problems! It wouldn't make a day without a BSOD on a fresh Windows install. Pretty good!

Anyone who reads this blog knows I'm not big on fancy pictures and stuff, just the meat of my thoughts and for what its worth - Mint is great. I was very happy with 18 and it's variants, and thus far, I'm very pleased with 19. For older computers, for computers kids will touch or for people willing to try something new, it is my choice for a Windows or Apple alternative. In fact, even if you're a power Windows user, it might be worth putting the ISO onto a USB and Live booting it for fun and seeing what it can do. Over a USB3 connection and a USB3 thumb drive it's very usable. The install from there is fast and simple.

*** Update to this post:

I've since upgraded my home PC to Mint 19. The desktop PC experience is every bit as good as the laptop experience and the straightforward in place upgrade from 18 to 19 was easy. There is a lot to love about this install from a user perspective. Get around it!

Mint 18.2 Review

Linux Mint 18.2 in the wild!

I’ve just upgraded to Mint 18.2 from 18.1 being the (sort of) early adopter that I am. Realistically there was no good reason to do this - 18.1 was running well and doing everything I need, except to get any new bits and pieces that come with .2. There are some nice new desktop pics (quite beautiful ones actually), but not much I can see that is really different. It's still running Cinnamon, so there haven't been any gigantic changes in the UI in a while. I’m running it on a Lenovo M series desktop that I’ve had for some years and it’s a beast of a machine so any performance upticks in the new version aren’t really noticeable. Here are the release notes : http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3289 and they're worth a quick perusal.

I did find that my desktop icons all disappeared. As a result I experienced sadness :-(

Fortunately I found the solution. The nemo-desktop application is no longer running. I found it (/usr/bin/nemo.desktop), ran it and voila - icons are back! I’ve added it to the startup applications and that fixes that.

I really enjoy the ease of the upgrade process - it’s fast and straightforward using the excellent Mint Update Manager. The download was around 400MB but the mirrors are all quick and it was quite painless. A fast reboot and I was back in business. I also took the opportunity to upgrade the Nvidia drivers I have (for my whiz bang graphics adaptor) and after another restart I was done. As a result, my primary work computer was fully upgraded and operational in about 20 minutes - much better than the Windows 10 computers I've just got that need a 4GB upgrade out of the box (!)

Mint 18.2 “Sonya” new stuff:

• LTS release so supported until 2021
• Cinnamon 3.4 apparently has many new icon management features (I’ll have to try this out now I’ve got icons back!)
• Plugins for Cinnamon run in their own process
• Add-ons called “spices” have been added - check them out on the Cinnamon Spices website here: https://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com/
• Various app upgrades including xed, update manager, xviewer, xreader and LightDM - the new login manager.
• Ships with Linux Kernel 4.8.0-53

Get it via Update Manager or from the Linux Mint website: https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

Linux and the Desktop

Often as I read my Internet news I note that the perennial question of "Is Linux ready for the desktop?" and I started thinking about it. I've also recently been playing with Windows 8 and I said to my co-worker "Is Windows 8 ready for the desktop?" We both laughed. As an outgrowth of this I started to really look at what it would take for me as a consultant with a range of small and medium business clients to move them to Linux. 

Obviously there are a range of applications that are not cross platform - usually either financial (MYOB etc) or industry specific stuff.Wine could potentially take care of this, or even running Windows in a virtual machine - which is common with people needing Windows XP to run specific software and being unable to run it on Windows 7 (and also 8). As for the common applications like word processing, spreadsheets and presentations there are a range of Open Source versions like NeoOffice, or even Google Apps or Office 365.

If you consider application support beyond the specific software noted above, there are plenty of applications available in your Linux of choice for all the stuff you want to do - video / audio / image editing, video / audio play etc. The options are numerous.

Taking into account Linux's robust architecture and resilience against viruses, trojans and malware, then the operating system starts to really look good. It's not uncommon for me to have a Linux desktop with 30 plus days of up time. Updates are easy and encompass the OS as well as apps, all in one reasonably easy to use package (I like Linux Mint personally and it's great for all these things). 

Take Android for example. Prior to it gaining popularity I bet there were a lot of people asking if Android was ready for the mobile market place. Time has certainly shown that it is. The difference between the mobile phone marketplace and the desktop is simply that the competition is so much more fierce. Microsoft's  stranglehold over the desktop, strengthened by their bundled browser Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player and buy in from all the big software firms. 

Chromebooks - Linux on the desktop! Obviously it's ready - it needs the brilliant packaging and design of MacOS X. And probably someone big to push it. Dell have been offering it for some time now and the excellent Ubuntu Windows installer (also available on Mint) gives the new user a chance to play with it. 

Give Linux a try - if only in a virtual machine and make up your own mind:

http://www.ubuntu.com

http://www.linuxmint.com

http://www.redhat.com

http://www.apple.com

Further adventures with the HP N40L and Dragonfly BSD

Since my last post, I've tried a bunch of different things with this box. These include:

• Xenserver with the following virtual machines:
• Ubuntu Server
• Windows Home Server 2011
• FreeNAS
• DragonflyBSD
• Ubuntu Server
• Linux Mint 13

Having the 2TB mirror has caused many of the problems. FreeNAS simply crashed and used 100% of CPU the as soon as I tried to copy a file. Dragonfly wouldn't install. Ubuntu took 4 days to build a software RAID and then when we had a power failure, the RAID failed to build again. There was a lot of frustration and perhaps a cranky swear word or two.

Eventually I decided to follow this route:

• Installed Linux Mint 13 on the box, set up a software RAID for the large disks, and left the other disks simply as an install disk and an archive disk. 
• moved all the data from my Netgear Stora to the new server
• I've deployed it to replace my server and my media PC, allowing me to ditch two PCs, one UPS and the Stora.

Yes I'm going a bit greener :-) Thus far it's going quite well. I've managed to also build up a Dragonfly BSD backup server as well.

I took my old server and put the disks from my Stora and from an external USB drive that had a failed power converter. With 3 x 2 TB Disks and a 1 TB disk in the system I wanted a way to effectively use all that disk space. It's not for live data, just for periodic backups. The HAMMER file system is awesome for this because there is no fsck on boot - it's live and happening straight away. Dragonfly is also very lightweight and runs well on the system I've got. The HAMMER filesystem has a lot going for it too - I was able to add the three disks into a single filesystem of 5.5TB and it does the normal snapshots built into HAMMER. The set up and the speed it created the filesystems with was excellent. I had one small issue with my USB DVD drive during the installation which caused the whole thing to fall in a heap but once I used a USB drive the installation went quickly and smoothly.

Review: Linux Mint

I have long been an advocate of Debian GNU/Linux (hereafter referred to as Linux). It's wonderful for servers, stable, with a predictable development cycle. The Ubuntu distribution builds on this with a lovely desktop and wonderful, easy hardware and software management. Mint builds on this again with a polished distribution that I'm finding quite enjoyable to use. You can find Mint here at: www.linuxmint.com It's a regular 700MB download iso and uses Ubuntu repositories. As usual, you have the options of using the included software manager (which is good) or aptitude or apt (my preference).

The machine I'm using for this is a HP/Compaq Presario C300. It's an older laptop, with a Celeron M processor and I've bumped the RAM up to a gig which gives me plenty to play with, even given that the video card steals some RAM. The C300 also has a lovely wide screen with that glossy look I normally despise but find to be very eyeball friendly at the moment. It only has a 60GB hard disk which is completely adequate for my needs. On to the review of Mint...

Given that this distribution is built on Ubuntu there are many lovely features that are underlying it. All the hardware in the notebook was picked up very swiftly and easily. It all worked out of the box. As a little back story - I was running Ubuntu on this notebook but the wireless wouldn't connect to my hidden wireless network. Frustrated because there seemed no answer to this problem, I found via Google a forum note that Mint worked correctly. The developers have apparently fixed this up. So I installed it and enabled things like the encrypted home directory (just to play with). The performance of the device is not noticeably affected by the decryption/encryption of files in my home directory which is nice. Access to all controls is through the Control Centre and I've had no problems with it at all. Automatically detecting devices works beautifully - Mint found and configured my HP2100 laser printer quickly and very easily. This is the kind of thing I love about the new Linux distributions. Long ago I remember writing the lp files to get printers recognised and working. Not much fun at all - but very stable!

Stability is always an issue for me. Being a computer professional, the last thing I want to do is come home and have to fix my own PCs - what a nightmare that always is. Especially given I have a *very* non-standard network doing all kinds of weird things and the last thing I want to do is try to work out whether it's my PC or my network causing things to be unhappy. Mint is wonderfully stable. I've had it running as my day to day work machine, in and out of suspend and hibernate and it's been terrific. It's worked reliably and quickly even with the in and out of suspend/hibernate. I have had problems with this in the past with other Linux distributions but Mint kicked butt. As a work box that needs to do all kinds of weird things and do them reliably, Mint does the job admirably.

On a superficial level, I like the green theme and the backgrounds etc are all very good. I really don't like the browns of Ubuntu and usually the first thing I do is to change the themes and backgrounds. I know I know - very shallow but... I'm still using the default Mint theme. It's nice and it's easy on the eyes. I'd recommend this distribution for the novice user all the way through to the systems admin type person. I don't know that it would suit the hardcore hacker (not being one) but I'm sure someone of that ilk would get by :-) You also have the option of the LTS 5 year supported version the same as Ubuntu. It's a nice little option to have. Otherwise you get the same release cycle as Ubuntu.

In conclusion Mint is definitely worth a look and it's heritage of stability, great software and hardware configuration, and ease of use make it a terrific distribution.