For a variety of reasons that I won't go into here, I needed to install a working Linux operating system on my wife's PC.  My wife is a Windows XP user.  We had a very old version of Kubuntu installed on it that hadn't been touched in several years.

This Linux installation on my wife's PC will be used periodically for specific tasks.  The brunt of my wife's computer time will remain in the XP environment.  Based on the experiences so far with MintV KDE on my PC, this was the natural choice. Below is a short summary of this operating system installation and configuration.

Installation:

Since I had partitions set up already, there was no pre-installation partition work to be done.  I just needed to launch GParted Live again so I could get the partition identifiers that I needed for the ext3 partition for "/".  With this information in hand I inserted the DVD for the MintV KDE.  At bootup, the PC reverted to the installed GRUB menu that came with the old Kubuntu installation!  I then re-booted and entered the bios setup to check the boot order.  Everything looked good.  After the second failed Mint V Live CD attempt, I took the DVD to my PC and booted to it perfectly.

Evidently, there is something I'm missing probably in the bios setup.  Since time was somewhat of a factor, I decided to forgo the KDE installation via the DVD.  I went to the download site and found that the only way I could get an iso sized to a CD install was to use either Gnome or X.  I opted for the Gnome desktop so I downloaded and burned the iso to CD.  

After getting the go-ahead with the md5 checksum, I booted to the install CD.  Everything worked fine.  I selected the manual partition option during the installation as I was pre-configured (this is the ONLY way I will install a new operating system).  After identifying the "/" partition and the other partition that I wanted mounted at bootup time (a NTFS data partition), the balance of the installation process sailed.

Startup and Configuration

The initial startup of the new Mint Gnome installation went well.  The only negative comment I have is that the leading dialog that greets the new startup is mis-leading and probably a source of a lot of mis-understanding.  This dialog basically asks the user whether they want to default boot up with super user priv's each time.  Personally, I would recommend eliminating this whole dialog and leave the default bootup security in place. This reduces the likelihood of the user accidentally doing some seriously bad things to their ops.  If the user needs super user priv's, there are a number of traditional routes into this environment.

The other things that I noticed with the initial boot up is that Mint V Gnome auto configured the attached printer (a Samsung ML-2010)!  Now this may seem to be trivial to a lot of the readers, but I was totally blown away by this level of sophistication at auto configuration.  I remember some really gruelling experiences trying to get my Lexmark laser configured in earlier vintages of Ubuntu and Kubuntu (both have come a long way in this area with recent releases).

Given that the PC will be used for limited applications by my wife, there were very few apps that I needed to install beyond the basic MIntV lineup of apps.  The apps that I did install included:

• K3B
• Krusader
• Partimage
• The Microsoft True Type Fonts

Configuring Firefox was a breeze as all I had to do was to import the bookmarks from her XP installation (I must add that I did take the "liberty" of re-organizing, or adding organization to her bookmarks).  Thunderbird also included importing the existing XP address book.  I did need to set up a brand new e-mail (pop3) e-mail account for Thunderbird.

The last thing that I wanted to accomplish was to have a top panel on the desktop.  This is where I wanted to put quick launch icons for the few apps my wife would be running while booted to Linux.  My first attempt was to go into the various desktop setups and see if I could find a suitable "switch" to turn this feature on (there is something akin to this in the KDE desktop).  No success there.  My next attempt was to try the familiar "right click" on the desktop itself.  The option presented with the "right click" didn't get me there either.  After these two failures, I opted to consult the technical forums at Mint.  As it turned out, I needed to "right click" on the bottom panel which gave me the option to add a panel.  That worked!

Concluding Remarks:

The MInt series of Linux operating systems continue to impress me with both their stability and ease of use.  As I stated in the other review that I posted here, this is one of the best thought out distro's I have encountered in my 4+ years of using Linux.  Additionally, the support area for this distro is excellent.  Based on my experiences so far I would rate Mint as 4.5 Star Distro.

Links:

Mint Home Page:  http://linuxmint.com/

Mint Download Area : http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

Mint Tech Forums : http://linuxmint.com/forum/

Contribute to Mint : http://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php

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