Sunday, June 23, 2013

Linux Mint, several hours in

Overall, the experience has been pretty positive.  I took a couple hours fiddling with the system settings, preferences, and all that jazz (of course!).  Of note, I'm now using the proprietary Nvidia graphics driver as opposed to the FOSS version (that was selected by default).  There was noticeable improvements to the rendering/responsiveness speed right away.

I snagged Steam and will be trying out one of my games (X3: Albion Prelude) as it is my *only* game that works on Steam Linux.

I also immediately grabbed some of Nehe's code for setting up opengl programs since I hadn't done windowing/graphics code on Linux in the last decade or so and I've completely forgotten what I was doing and I'm anxious to start porting game engine tech to the platform.

I did crash the window manager once trying to run "glxinfo | grep OpenGL".  To be fair, I think I did this command in a terminal while I was changing the graphics driver... so fair deal.

Firefox was noticeably glitchy and generally unpleasant, so I put Chrome on here, much better.

The only really annoying thing so far I've noticed is that I can't seem to middle/wheel click a webpage in Chrome and scroll around by moving the mouse (like you can in Windows)... so that's kind of annoying.

All in all, if it wasn't for several Windows-only games, I'd probably ditch Win7 completely.  I'm pretty impressed where Linux has come from in the last 15 years or so in terms of the general desktop (aside from the amazing tech fueling the OS itself of course).

Linux Mint - Installing from Live USB stick

Continuing from my last post...

I got tired of waiting around for this USB stick thing to do whatever it was suppose to do, so like always, I figured I did something wrong.

I put the USB stick back in to my main system and changed my options around a bit.  Instead of putting syslinux on the USB stick for the PBR, I changed it to NTLDR.  Then, I also changed my multi-partition set up, back to single partition using NTFS.

I don't plan on using this USB stick for much, other than just getting Mint installed on my resurrected system, so I didn't opt for any sort of persistent storage.
Well, fiddling with my BIOS' options, I realized I inadvertently turned off "Legacy USB storage"... which caused a foreseeable issue.  I turned that back on, and put everything back in the new old system... and bam, everything works!  I wrote this from the live loaded Linux Mint USB stick!
Let's see if this has gimp or anything else installed so that I can post a screenie.  Thankfully, firefox was already installed, so that went off without a hitch.

I ran a terminal, and did "gimp &" (to run gimp in the background), and bam, it's there, even the most up to do date version of it! (2.8.4 at the time of this writing!).

Now, how to remember to take a screenshot with it...


And there we have it.  Looks like I just need to install mint to the hard drive officially now and we'll be all set!

I will say this, Mint is pretty impressive.  If there ever comes a day and games take over the linux desktop (via Steam or whatever), then maybe this will catch on even more with the masses.  All I know is I'm not a fan of Windows 8.