[grc]

I've had my 10v a long time. Windows XP upgraded to 7, with the stock HD and 1GB RAM.

It was getting crufty, so I decided that as all I ever did was fire up a web browser, I'd go with a linux distro and used Mint 13 as it seems popular. I'm familiar with Linux in the enterprise space, but I've been out of touch with desktop flavours for a while.

Anyway, I find that the WiFi is supported with the unsupported driver, so that's cool. Sound and video work.

Trackpad is busted though. I find that the button area is finger sensitive so as you approach the button to click, you move the pointer.

I can set synclient BottomArea=4000 which disables the button area on the trackpad and makes it so it doesn't move the pointer when I click, but this has the bad side effect of disabling click+drag. With BottomArea=0, you can click and drag.

I've seen some solutions to this based on some patched synaptics driver, but doesn't appear to be applicable to Mint 13. Any ideas?

Secondly, the laptop gets scorchio hot. Much more so than under Windows, and I only seem to get 90 minutes battery life out of it. I suspect not a lot of power management is going on. Hows the power management faring under Linux? I find that Mint 13 has almost zero power options.

Or ... Is there a better (which mostly means, more compatible, cooler running) version of Linux I should be looking at instead? Needs to support the WiFi, video, sound, trackpad, power managment properly, as well as being a decently supported desktop distro.

Thanks!

[lswartz]

You are welcome to try my version of Linux but I don't think there is anything wrong with Mint. Sounds to me like your HD is active 100% of the time. You might try Ubuntu on a USB flash drive & see how your Mini behaves. If the heat is OK & battery life improves, then consider installing Ubuntu.

[jamiethemorris]

Gpointing device settings works fine for me in 13. I find mint 13 a lot slower than 12 though. It actually runs slower than osx and windows 7 on mine.