I have heard a lot of good feedback and saw really nice screenshots of Mint 7 Gloria, both Gnome and KDE versions. I had about 15GB of free space on a Western Digital USB drive and thought I’d go ahead and try it out. I already had Ubuntu and previous versions of Mint installed on the same drive. I booted up my Mint 6 system, downloaded the iso and burned it onto a CD with no issues. The computer I was and still am using is a Sony Vaio VGN-CR35G laptop with an ATI graphics card.

The installation itself was a breeze. No different from other processes I’ve gone through. The way my drive is set up is not unusual. I have 10GB partitions for the linux distros that I try out and a single /home partitions that is slightly larger. During the first boot, I was impressed with how great and streamlined it looks from login screen to desktop. I have no issues with drivers and the wireless works without any fuss, just like other versions. I feel that the run time from boot to desktop is faster and the annoying beep at shutdown isn’t there anymore. I’m excited to plug this drive into other computers in the house to see if compatibility would be an issue. I will have to write another entry on that.

Overall, I’d have to say that this is the easiest install that I have ever done. If I remember correctly, it is the quickest finish too. The artwork that comes with it is top caliber as always. You can never have too much eye candy. Compiz runs and works by default, which is great. I can’t really say anything more other than I wish I could sync this with my Ubuntu One account. Currenty, UO is in its beta stage and can only be used with a Jaunty system. Hopefully, that gap will be bridged in the near future. At the rate things go right now, that’s probably soon.

The One with Linux Mint 5 Elyssa works out of the box except for the wireless connection. It couldn’t detect the wireless. All I had to do was use the Windows Driver utility under Administration to install the wifi driver in /usr/lib/LinuxMint/MintWifi (not sure if this is the exact location). Reboot and that’s it.

So I had some trouble playing .avi files in my Ubuntu 8.10 box. I searched the handy dandy Ubuntu Forums and found what I was looking for. I went on to download and install the updates available. And then ran the following commands in the terminal.

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/intrepid.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get remove gnash gnash-common libflashsupport mozilla-plugin-gnash swfdec-mozilla && sudo apt-get install alsa-oss faac faad flashplugin-nonfree gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse gstreamer0.10-pitfdll libavcodec-unstripped-51 libmp3lame0 non-free-codecs sun-java6-fonts sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin unrar

These commands got my files playing again. I’ve only tried a .avi file though. In the future, I might get a chance to play other file types. But I’m pretty sure that I won’t have any issues. In case I do, I can always check the forums for solutions.

I have the exact same Conky setup as in my Hardy installation. I had an issue with the borders having shadows and couldn’t figure out what was wrong in my configuration. Turns out, my Conky code is fine. A fellow ubuntuforums.org user pointed out that the cause is CompizFusion. I didn’t have CompizConfig installed at the time. The weird thing was that my Conky worked flawlessly in my upgraded Intrepid Ibex but the shadow/border shows up when I used the fresh install.

I installed CompizConfig and turned off Window Decoration as recommended. That did not solve the issue though. I was playing around with the settings and discovered where the fault lied. It was the opacity of the shadow/borders. I dragged it to the minimum that the bar would let me, saved the settings and ran Conky again. It works great now.

Heron has been bugging me for quite some time because of automatic update issues. It just would automatically check for updates so I went ahead and upgraded to 8.10 Ibex. Now my gut tells me that something is seriously wrong with my Heron installation and that I should just do a clean install but I’ve decided to wait til the final release or when I get the cd.

After a few hours of sleep, I have Intrepid up and running. First thing I noticed is the wallpaper and I like it. My conky is working just great. Everything seems dandy for now. Better than Heron, I think. We’ll see…

Not much progress in my Portable Multi-Distro Linux USB Drive Project. I’ve been busy with my transfer to another department in the company (and getting a PS2 plus a couple of PSP’s).  I know for sure that the concept works. I just need to install a non-debian/ubuntu based distribution to make it complete. And I’m certainly going to keep Grub as my boot loader. Much simpler than others out there. My biggest concern is experimenting with distributions that use CLI only installation. I’m fairly new to the Linux world and pilot error is highly probable. Plenty of documentation around though but limited time to peruse them. I’ll see how it goes.

On another topic, I was surprised to find out that after a few years in the market, there hasn’t been much success in crafting a PSP Emulator for PC’s. I’m not sure how much truth is on the net about the custom firmware’s source code not being released. Not sure if its release would even help. I was planning on testing some iso/cso files before loading them onto the console.

As with everything else, time will tell…

I got a new Heron installation and had to reinstall everything. Hope it works for you. Just open up a terminal and enter these commands.

echo "deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ hardy free non-free" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list

wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get remove mozplugger && sudo apt-get install acroread acroread-plugins mozilla-acroread mozplugger flashplugin-nonfree

I think I got the hang of it. I have not created a separate /boot partition yet. I installed Linux Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” on my second target partition. The first of the five available partitions is currently being occupied by Linux Mint 5 “Elyssa”. I’ve been doing a lot of reading about Grub and practicing on it on Mint 5’s menu.lst. It now has all the OS of my 2 machines – Sempron Desktop and Sony Vaio laptop. So as long as I’m using Grub, I think I’ll be fine. I’m now rethinking that separate /boot partition. It looks like my current setup is fine. I can wipe out my Ubuntu 8.04 practice installation and put Mandriva One or OpenSUSE 11.0 KDE4 over it.

On another note, I’ve been able to successfully boot my Western Digital Scorpio drive containing all of this between the 2 computers mentioned above. All I needed was to edit the menu.lst and use /dev/sdb5 when on the laptop and sdc5 when on the desktop. Then boot into recovery, fix X and boot the normal way. It’ll ask for the proprietary video drivers again since the former has ATI and the latter Nvidia. One more reboot and all is set.

BIOS reads the USB drive as first while the OS thinks it’s last. The BIOS part is true for both machines that’s why I didn’t have to edit that part. All seems well at multi-booting, Grub menu editing and switching machines. Everything I’ve tried works including wireless. Now I just have to finish the downloads.

Nothing to see here. Just listing what I have for future reference…

1)
AMD Athlon X2 4000 AM2 (2.10GHz)
Emaxx MCP61S-AVL
2GB Geil DDR800
GeForce 7300GT 512MB
160 GB HDD
*Windows XP

2)
AMD Sempron 2200+ (1.60GHz)
Asrock K7VM3
1GB DDR400
GeForce FX5200
Seagate 160GB IDE HDD
Samsung 80GB
Maxtor 40GB
*Windows XP
*Linux Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron”

3)
Sony Vaio VGN-CR35G
Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 (2.10GHz)
14.1″ WGA Display
Wireless 4965 AGN
Mobility Radeon X2300
2GB SODIMM
Toshiba MK2546GS 200GB HDD
*Windows Vista

4)
Western Digital Scorpio External Drive 80GB
*Linux Mint 5 “Elyssa”
*Linux Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron”

5)
Linux Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” – Since April 2007
Linux Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” – Since January 2008
Linux Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy Heron” – Since May 2008
Linux Mint 5 “Elyssa” – Since June 2008

I installed another OS on my portable hard drive and didn’t want to go through the hassle of rebuilding my bookmarks. Got help from nice people and thought to share. For Firefox 3, they make it fairly simple. You only need one file – places.sqlite. Now I’m on Linux so I’m not sure if the windows version has this file or hides it. The only thing that I had to do was copy places.sqlite from my working FF3 to my new one and closed/reopened it. I got everything I need. It copies the bookmarks but not the passwords. So you’ll have to enter those again the first time that you access emails and other sites with logins.

Hope this helps!