I installed Linux Mint 11 last night. And this morning. And again this morning. I think I’m done now.
I’ve been using Linux Mint for several years and just loving it. It’s the most stable, most newbie-friendly, most media friendly Linux I know. Release 7 was terrific, 8 even better — and there I happily stayed until I began having browser woes. I knew there could be hassles jumping three versions forward, but Mint is so friendly I wasn’t worried.
Ha!
First time I tried to install, it insisted on a username and password long before any had been set. It hinted that the username it wanted was “mint,” but no password in the ‘verse would appease it.
After researching and finding others having the same problem — but no one having a solution — I restarted and tried again. This time it didn’t ask for any impossible information. Guess it decided I was okay.
However this time, though a combo of my own brain fart and one of Mint’s new features (really, if you’re going to have slider bars that hide until somebody mouses over them, you really ought to tell the n00bs that’s what they have to do to access additional configuration options), I screwed up the install by not mounting all my quirky little partitions.
Third time, I got the partitions right, and thought everything was just hunky-dory and nifty-zorch — until I was configuring email and noticed that the @ key was typing ” . And yes, the ” key was typing @. And the pound (#) key was typing pound as in British money, despite my having definitely chosen the standard U.S. keyboard.
Fourth time I finally got good old Mint — complete with all (or nearly all) of my saved configurations. Yay!
The only thing that gave me real trouble is the Thunderbird mail reader. Mint 11 comes with T’bird 3.1.9 (which is far from being the latest release, but seems to be the latest stable Debian package). And T’bird 3.1.9 sucks is a seriously mixed bag. It’s not only filled with crazy quirks (like insisting that some, but not all, “sent” folders be subfolders of the inbox), but in the name of Windows-type automation, it makes it darned near impossible to custom-configure server settings.
Its autoconfigure feature is theoretically cool; but once it decides it wants you to use IMAP servers, not POP3s servers (which it always does, even when IMAP servers might not be available), then you’re going to use IMAP servers (and therefore you’re going to have separate inboxes for each and every one of your dozens of email addresses) even if you opt to configure manually. The only way to avoid it, apparently, is to erase any mail account you just created, click to create a new account, then hit STOP! as quick as you can before the autoconfigure process starts.
Please tell me they got rid of that in later versions of the app. I’ll be watching for new .deb packages.
Anyhow, the short version of the story is that I’m back in business, with only a few deadly email glitches still to work out.
—–
Oh yeah. And Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II was really good. Not great (I don’t think any of the Potter films qualify as great), but one of the best and definitely a fitting, whiz-bang, beautiful, touching conclusion to a remarkable series. Voldemort … positively Shakespearian. Neville … comes valiantly into his own. Minerva McGonagall … steals the show with her couple of tiny scenes. Snape … no wonder viewers made him the winner of the Harry Potter World Cup. And Ron, Hermoine, and Harry … what can you say? Even if not one of the movies rose to Lord of the Rings level, it’s a pretty amazing thing to have made eight so good, with the final being among the best.
Sorry the news about Thunderbird is bad, but I’m glad to have heard it here. I have been struggling with Evolution in Ubuntu for months now, and was contemplating trying TBird again. I had tried it several years ago and had serious issues… like ALL my email vanishing permanently…
Figured there must be a better version up now… but I think I’ll just go on living with the quirks in Evolution. A dog often gets used to its fleas….
try claws-mail. I gave up on Thunderbird and Evolution ages ago and am very happy with claws.
just saw Potter with family and agree very good … amazing they kept the cast together (save of course Richard Harris) … we watched these kids grow up in front of us
[…] Sometimes things don’t go all that well (Linux Mint 11) (Harry Potter was better) I installed Linux Mint 11 last night. And this morning. And again this morning. I think I’m done now. […]
The slider bar issue you were having is a new upstream “feature” of Ubuntu 11.04 called overlay scrollbars. I truly hate them and feel they are another example of Canonical changing stuff for no apparent reason other than to say they have new features. They are a serious regression in functionality, but not the fault of the Mint team.
3dbeef — Thank you for the clarification. I should have thought about that being a Canonical/Ubuntu “feature” (for those who don’t know, Mint is a customization of the very popular Ubuntu Linux). I can’t say I hate it. But the execution is definitely faulty, and yes there’s definitely a “huh?” factor about why they did it.
Now that I’m past the installation glitches, I’m back to enjoying Mint very much.
Jorge, thanks for the suggestion of claws-mail. Never heard of it.
I continue to use Thunderbird for one reason only — the Enigmail add-on. With that, Thunderbird is the most encryption-friendly mail reader I’ve ever tried.
I haven’t used Evolution in a few years, but last time I did, it was disastrously bad with encryption.
I’d gladly try any other mail reader that had a PGP/GPG interface as brilliant and easy as Enigmail. But I don’t know of one.
Otherwise, yes, T’bird can be a pain, particularly when trying to port mail to a new system. Funny, they have an import function that lets you bring in mail from other apps. But it can take hours of head-banging to figure out how to get a new version of T’bird to recognize it’s own mail files and accounts from an earlier version. Weird.
Other than that, though …
My problems with Evolution don’t include the encryption. GnuPG works just fine and installed with no problems at all. Evolution has a seriously screwed up address book, well verified by the support forum entries, but no “fix” has so far surfaced. If anybody knows of one, I’m all ears.
Claws might be just slightly more heavyweight than you need. I’ve been using Sylpheed for years. It works right out of the box with GnuPG (Implementation of PGP on Linux, and I’m guessing the same thing Enigmail uses.)
In re. disappearing scrollbars, well, I read those reviews, and I’m going to stay at Ubuntu 9.10 until I can figure out what other distro to install. Of course, Gnome3 is a big pile of “we’re changing a bunch of crap on you” too. However, there is a way to get rid of the Unity desktop shell (what Canonical is packaging with Ubuntu these days) and switch to pure Gnome. I’m pretty sure you can find it easily, as I’ve seen it mentioned in several articles. However, the new Gnome desktop shell isn’t without its quirks either. Maybe, now that KDE4 has matured, it’s a viable option instead of Gnome.
I gave up a while back, and switched back to Fvwm, but that’s not an option I’d recommend for everyone. And as it’s just a window manager, it won’t help with disappearing scrollbars anyway, as that’s part of the application library. Sigh.
Anyways, after dealing with all the cruft of Evolution, it’s likely Sylpheed will feel like a breath of fresh air. I’ve never used Thunderbird, so I don’t know how it compares to that.