According to two articles on Linux Magazine, Linux Mint is the next big Linux distro. Taking the advice of the latter article ("Linux Mint 10: A Perfect 10?"), I decided to download the Linux Mint 10 install live DVD and give it a spin in a VirtualBox OSE virtual machine.
Unfortunately, it was quite possibly the most frustrating and dissappointing Linux live installer I have ever tried. I shall now enumerate the problems I encountered:
1. Metacity crashes
Or, at least, I think it was Metacity. The title bars would disappear from all
open windows, and I could no longer change the window Z-order. I have seen this
before, and it was repairable by restarting metacity. I cannot find
a reliable sequence of actions to reproduce the problem, unfortunately.
Additionally, even the task bar would crash and restart itself, and I managed to crash the installer by choosing "Quit" from the first page.
2. No LVM
LVM is not installed in the live image, and the installer does not allow
configuration of LVM. But even when I installed LVM using apt-get,
the installer would not recognize the logical volumes I created. I can
understand LVM configuration being a big task for an installer, but at least if
it would recognize logical volumes, an advanced user could still set up the
system properly.
3. Personal Information Page Broken
The installer page that takes personal information to create the first user refused to take any input in any of the text fields, either during or after the installation finished. By the way, I was very impressed by the installer collecting only the essentials and beginning the copying of the system while the rest of the information was collected. But then it stopped collecting information, and did not finish the install.
I was able to repair the install, but I would be surprised if many users would know or even think to manually repair a broken install. If such a user happens across this entry, here is how to make your system work if the installer fails before finishing:
Step 1: Put yourself into the installed system
Get a root prompt and set up a directory containing the new install:
$ sudo su
# cd /mnt
# mkdir root
# mount /dev/sda5 root
# cd root
# mount -t devtmpfs none dev
# mount -t proc none proc
# mount -t sysfs none sys
# mount /dev/sda1 boot
# mount /dev/sda6 home
# chroot .
Obviously, your partitions will likely be different. The above layout depends
on a partition table that looks like this:
/dev/sda1 /boot
/dev/sda2 swap
/dev/sda3 [extended]
/dev/sda5 /
/dev/sda6 /home
Step 2: Create your user
Create a new user for yourself:
# useradd -d /home/jonathan -m -s /bin/bash -U jonathan
# usermod -a -G adm,dialout,cdrom,plugdev,lpadmin,admin,sambashare jonathan
# passwd jonathan
Step 3: Set up grub
Tell Grub to install itself. This is surprisingly easy with Ubuntu-based
systems, as the update-grub2 command will do it all for you:
# update-grub2
You should now be able to reboot into your new system (don't forget to remove the disc).
4. Keyboard Layout Not Saved
I use the Dvorak keyboard layout because it feels like my fingers flow better than with the Qwerty layout. I can still use Qwerty, but it feels clumsy. So, when the installer gets to the keyboard layout page, I chose Dvorak. But it did not remember that choice when I booted into the new system, and instead was using the Qwerty layout.
Impressions
Once I had the system running, I really liked what they did with the menu (what I would call the Start menu if it was Windows). It has big icons for all of the important programs right on the first display, along with smaller choices for the other useful but less common programs. They realized something that most other environments have not yet: If you are using the system menu, you are not interacting with another program, so why not take advantage of the screen to display everything well?
I also liked the clean interface. From the boot splash screen to the standard set of sounds, everything is simple and clean, and seems to be inspired by Apple. The icon sets are attractive, and different enough from what you may be used to that they are actually worth looking at.
Conclusions
I will not be using Linux Mint 10 as my OS of choice. I was impressed with the concurrent install/extra setup info, and with the few pieces of the main system after I had it running, but my heart just wasn't in the exploration. Once I discovered that I would be unable to use LVM, I completely lost interest in actually using the system. LVM is to partitioning a hard drive as directories are to a completely flat filesystem, and I cannot live without it.
Perhaps I will try the Debian-based version, or Linux Mint 11 when it comes out, but I am quite satisfied with Kubuntu 10.04 LTS for now.
