This is a short review of the recently released Mint 9 64 bit Gnome edition.

The first installation utilized the DVD option for the installation.  The DVD was chosen due to the  expanded number of applications that were bundled to it. 

After downloading the iso file, it's integrity was verified via a comparison to the md5 checksums.  The installation went flawlessly.  As part of the installation parameters, I opted to utilize a ext3 file system (this allowed me to continue to use Partimage as my partition backup utility).  I also identified each of my data partitions with associated mount points in /mnt.

Immediately following the installation, the system was re-booted.  The only task performed on this initial bootup was to do the 91 updates that were queued on the post installation.  Problems began on the re-boot.  At the bootup, warnings were posted that each of the  mounted partitions on the non-ops drive (1TB) could not be found or mounted.  The mounting of these partitions at bootup was skipped.  The /etc/fstab file was modified so that the uuid's were removed and hard  locations were used instead. 

The next step was to re-boot into the Mint FluxBox and re-direct the GRUB (version 1x) back to the default dedicated GRUB partition.  A re-boot initially brought up a busy box with errors.  After a couple of additional re-attempts, Mint 9 started the bootup properly.  Again the mount warnings persisted.

At this point, Mint 9 was re-installed.  The second installation utilized an ext4 file system.  Additionally, only a few mount points were identified on the second hard drive.  The same type of problems persisted with respect to mounting of the second hard drive partitions.

The final attempt used the CD version of Mint 9 for the installation.  Again the md5 checksum was verified before burning the CD (it was also verified as part of the burn process).  The same type of errors occurred with this installation.

Conclusion:

Based on the experiences with the above attempts to install and use Mint 9 64 bit Gnome,  my conclusion is that this edition is not suitable for use.  The problems experienced above are not hardware dependent as I am currently using 3 different variations of Mint plus Windows 7 Pro successfully.  The hardware that this installation was attempted is fairly up range with an Intel dual quad processor, 8G RAM and 1G video.  The hard drives are a 750G SATA used for ops and a 1TB SATA used for data.

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