I got Linux Mint 8. Something to do while snowed in by the midwest storm. Eh.. it’s all right, but, I kind of wish I would have stuck with 7. It has a few improvements, but not that much to shout about. Had trouble configuring my old Nvidia 6200 card with it. I finally figured it out. At first the slideshows with my video player were really sluggish. Had to tweak the settings. This has GNOME, but it’s not big deal. Looks the same. What I want is something SIMPLE that WORKS.
Used a fresh hard drive, a 300gb IDE drive that I got for cheap from Geeks.com. Before I had a motley assortment of drives. A 300GB slaved to a 30GB. So I migrated my stuff.
I like those USB drives, the old 160GB USB drive is VERY useful, and man they are getting quite cheap, if you order on ebay from China, and are willing to wait.
The winter hard on the numerous homeless girls around here. Eh I ran ’em all off. They won’t stop taking drugs or get real. There are many people like that. I guess there is money in the drug trade, but those poor girls are on the losing end o’ the deal.
Drugs and booze are o.k. for Famous people. Maybe that is why some poor people try to emulate them. I am here to tell you, they can’t handle the cost. The jail’s “Rehab” program is like.. grits and rice.. it’s just awful. The state run rehab programs are not too nice. The girls generally go back to prostituting. They had a miserable life to begin with. It is terrible what people go through in this world.
I recommend Linux Mint 7. Linux Mint 8 seems a little more sluggish. The improvements don’t seem that great. Still- Mint is great, and I like it better than Windows. At least XP. Never tried Vista or Windows 7, and frankly.. I dont care to. Linux Mint 8 uses Gnome, which has better eye candy. I dunno. ALL of the releases are in use, and people are quite happy with them. They all work. Mint 7 was quite satisfactory. I just decided to use Mint 8 cos it just came out.
One thing about Linux.. it seems harder to uninstall it than many programs. Even wiping the drive out, people report vestiges of the GRUB bootloader stil present on the drive.
I am thinking now, though it is blasphemous.. I am thinking.. that it might be better not to have Linux on the hard drive at ALL.. and just run it from the CD rom. It is slower..but not that much slower. I am uneasy with the way Linux Mint 8 has plastered itself all over my drive.
It could be better just to have your backup Windoze directory, and then only data on the drive. If this were the case now, I could simply slip in the Linux Mint 7 to run it, or any other distribution that I took a fancy too.
Northeast Confidential 
Linux Mint is superb for newbies, and the XFCE community edition is excellent on older hardware.
But for ETHICAL reasons I won’t ever use or recommend Linux Mint. For THREE reasons:
1 – While nothing they have done is illegal, and there is really no such thing as plagiarism in the world of Free and Open Source Software, Linux Mint seems completely plagiarized. Linux Mint is “Ubuntu with green paint” and multimedia codecs pre-installed. Other apps which are supposedly unique to Mint also appear to have “plagiarized.” MintMenu, for example, looks suspiciously like a green version of Gimmie (see http://beatniksoftware.com/gimmie/Main_Page). Take the Number One Linux distro, change a little artwork, take Canonical’s name off of it and put your own name on; add a few multimedia codecs (of questionable legality in several countries like the United States and Japan) and other apps borrowed from elsewhere, and bingo! You’re a “Linux developer.” Now all you have to do is make a deal with Google and rig it up as an automated fund-raiser. Perfect. Make money and gain fame with your new “distro.” Linux Mint is an Ubuntu remix, not a true distribution.
2 – Following “the Great Linux Mint Political Train Wreck” (see http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2346637,00.asp), Linux Mint has become an infamous project associated with anti-Semitic terrorism.
3 – Because merely USING Linux Mint raises money for the project (thanks to the default automated fund-raising Google search feature), it is reasonable to assume that if the “developer” is a man of conscience who puts his money where his mouth is, that a portion of those funds may be used to benefit Hamas and other terrorist groups in the so-called “Palestinian cause.”
Sorry. Great Ubuntu remix though it is, it is distasteful at best because of its politicization, and unworthy of the GNU/Linux community.
LikeLike