The following covers some highlighted experiences from a recent installation of Mint 10 Gnome (code named Julia). 

Hardware etc.

The operating system was installed on a desktop that I built.  The unit includes 8GB of high speed RAM, an Intel 4 core processor operating at 2.83 GHz.  The storage is comprised of 3 hard drives with a combined storage of 2.75TB. 

The operating system was installed on a 10GB ext4 partition with an accompanying 10 GB /home partition.  There is a dedicated GRUB legacy boot partition where all operating systems are booted from.

Installation

The LiveDVD was downloaded from a U.S. Mint mirror.  The iso checksum (md5) was cross checked against the original.  Additionally, the md5 was verified at the time that the installation DVD was burned.

There were no "incidents" at the time of the installation.  The front end of the installation is essentially the same one that has been in place for a  long time on the Ubuntu derivative operating systems.  One newer edition is the pre-install checklist of conditions.  It's a nice feature to identify any "show-stoppers" with respect to successful installation.  Based on this feature, I would  recommend establishing the wireless connection before attempting the installation.

When the installer came to the partitioning section, I always select the "manual" setup option.  This section has undergone a few changes that are of note here.  The basic setup of the default boot partition is the same with respect to editing the partition with it's associated file system, format option and mount points.  What has changed is the option at the bottom of the main partition setup identifying the location for the installation of the GRUB boot loader.  The placement of this important option leaves a higher chance of over-looking this important feature. 

As I recall, the user used to be able to "opt out" of the GRUB installation entirely.  This is no longer an option in the current installation.  It should be noted that if you are running with a dedicated GRUB partition, the only way to avoid disrupting things is to identify the GRUB install partition as the same one that the operating system is being installed to. 

With respect to the actual installation, one of the major features which is now missing is the final verification of the partitioning etc. BEFORE the actual installation process starts.  In my opinion, this is downright "goofy".  It is so important to have a final look at your partition commitment BEFORE the installation starts.

The actual installation went well.  In the race to become more ""window-ized" the user is now greeted with an animated slide show while the installation is underway.  My only comments are that a progress bar would have meant a whole lot more to this user than the dribble content of the slide show.

The actual installation process took the usual amount of time to complete the initial build (about 10-15 minutes with my hardware.  The post installation updates ran at the usual quantity also.

Applications:

The DVD version of Mint 10 comes with a full compliment of associated applications.  The path that I take on new installations is to do the basic installation and updates.  I then build up the applications, plug-ins etc. that I need for my core operating system.  The last step in this process is to bring across my application settings from my current production operating system /home to the new /home folder.

There are a few things I'd like to highlight with respect to some of the application buildup and configuration in Mint 10.

GEdit - It is now missing the "increase or decrease" the indent level.  While this is not a big deal, it is an annoyance given the amount of code that I generate.

Thunderbird - With the 3.1.7 version that come bundled with Mint 10, we are now missing the built in calendar and task manager.  This is definitely a step backwards for Mozilla.  Given this situation, it would have been better to leave the version advancement alone and keep these 2 features in the Thunderbird build.  On a positive note I was able to successfully drag across all of my Thunderbird settings so that I did not have to manually reconfigure my 5 POP E-Mail accounts (again).

Firefox - This was the one singular disappointment.  I tried numerous different attempts to bring across my settings from the current operating system to the new build.  Each attempt (which worked in previous versions) resulted in breaking Friefox.  I know this is not a Mint or Linux problem but rather goes back to Mozilla.  It's really hard to comprehend the logic behind not having a decent migration assistant available to import and export  all of the user settings from one Firefox build to another.  Given the large number of cookies etc, that I have invested in a working Firefox build, I wasted about 1.5 hours of my time getting the new Firefox operational.

Tasksel - This installation platform is no longer a default installation.  The user will need to install this from the repository before you can use it (in my case a LAMP server).

Conclusion:

The installation and subsequent buildup of Mint 10 went well.  The operating system seems to be stable after using it for a couple of weeks.  It looks like the major defect with the filesystem check at bootup (fsck) has finally been resolved.  For me, this was a show stopper in Mint 9.  Based on my experiences noted above, I would recommend that you consider building MInt 10 Gnome as your default Linux operating system.

Tim (aka DataMan) 

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