Linux Mint 5 Review

Dark Messiah · #1 (**permalink**) 11 Jun 08, 05:43 PM

Quote:

The wonderful team over at Linux Mint has just released their fifth version (release notes, download) of the operating system, codename Elyssa, presenting yet another stable and elegant system. I’ve installed and used every version of Linux Mint since Celena (3.1), and have lurked around the forums for a while. I decided to write a review for this version as this will mark the first release for Long Term Support; I hate updating my system every six months, so I plan to make this version my main operating system for the next three years.

I’m lucky to have blindly bought a computer that is very compatible with Linux. Wireless and Compiz work automagically, even from the Live CD environment.

I decided to do a sort of mix between reviewing for Mint newcomers and for those who have used Mint in the past. This review is not intended for newcomers to Linux, however they are encouraged to download Linux Mint and see how they like it. Linux newbies (and Linux Mint newbies!) can download the user guide to see the system and its features.

Installation
This has been covered over and over; the installer has not changed for quite a number of releases, so please see a different review if you wish to have a step-by-step guide

. A few thoughts, though:

Choosing your timezone: Doing this sucks. You move your mouse over the map to select a city, and oops, you’re now in Australia. You’re careful to maneuver your pointer to eastern USA, and shoot, you’ve moved too far and are now in Hawaii. It’s faster for me just to choose a city from the drop down menu. Also: I had the entire Live CD freeze up on me (with the exception of the mouse) during this step while trying to listen to one of my songs. As a result, I had to restart my computer. Hopefully the cause of this was MPlayer and not the installer. This incident is one example of why you probably shouldn’t do ANYTHING while the system is installing. Don’t take any chances.

Using the manual partition scheme: This was the first time I’ve had to manually set my mount points, as I just recently moved /home to its own partition. (By the way, if you’re looking to do this, Linux Mint has an excellent tutorial on the wiki.) Manually setting this was fairly easy; I chose my 10 GB empty partition to be formatted as ext3 and mounted at / , and I chose my 120 GB partition to be mounted at /home. Simple as can be

(for those who know about a little about partitions, anyway).

Booting
I didn’t time how long it took to boot, but thinking back, I believe this is one of the fastest boot times I’ve ever had in Linux Mint. And the boot screen looks delicious! It’s slightly different from version four (Daryna), but it looks cleaner and [therefore?] more professional. The default artwork is consistent; consistency is a quality that I hold very high.

Upon logging in for the first time, you are greeted with the mintAssistant, which asks you if you want to enable a root account (NOT recommended), and if you want fortunes to appear in the terminal. The fortune app is a great feature to enable; humor is always a good thing

. In this release, the fortunes are read to you by various animals! Hit the “Show an Example” button to see. Unfortunately it might not be an accurate representation; the example box does not display with a fixed width font. The animal might appear squished.

Linux Mint 5 Review The Gay Hacker

sydras · #2 (**permalink**) 11 Jun 08, 07:47 PM

The comments on the review site are quite an interesting read

.

Gaurish · #3 (**permalink**) 11 Jun 08, 09:06 PM

Good review!
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Linux Mint 5 Review Discussion under Open Source and Linux, part of the Software Zone category on TechEnclave; The wonderful team over at Linux Mint has just released their fifth version (release notes, download) of the operating system, ...