[grungysquash]

Well my work retired mini 9 is now having a new lease on life with the installation of Linux mint - Used to run it in the past (long distance past) and thought I would give it a twirl. Have OSX 10.6.4 running on one (daughter aged 8 now her laptop) and now Lunix mint 9 on the other.

Will be interesting to see how this compares to OSX and win 7 - has been a while for me with Linux so if it's NBG it may now be on for long!!!

This laptop is now becoming my (daughter aged 9) laptop - they seem to be using them more and more now so will keen to get her feedback on how easy/hard it is to use.

[Isthmus]

Good stuff. I can't wait to hear your feedback. One question though. How come you chose Mint over plain Ubuntu?

Also, did you go with the main edition of Mint, or did you try one of the other desktops (the XFCE version is very good and lighter on resources).

[reflex]

Hope it works well.

[grungysquash]

Originally Posted by Isthmus

Good stuff. I can't wait to hear your feedback. One question though. How come you chose Mint over plain Ubuntu?

Also, did you go with the main edition of Mint, or did you try one of the other desktops (the XFCE version is very good and lighter on resources).

The main reason for mint is only because I used to run this on my E1705 (I think it was mint 4), and found the issues with Ubuntu holding true to the purest idealogical principals - which means I need to download various codex's, drivers, open office etc etc etc. I would rather simply have a working solution without typing "sudo" which Mint is.

I am by no means a linux fan - but I do believe you need to try something before you discount it and it's good for the kids to see something other than microsoft.

So far Sophia (the 9 year old) has grasped it really quickly no issues found - she has yet to see the games repository but I expect to see her play a tad more once this is discovered.

My experience with mint currently is that it seems to be as quick as OSX - slightly slower on bootup and shutdown but speedy in everything else. The only issue was wireless was not running out of the box and I had to download the driver by connecting via the ethernet- The 5530 card has not been checked yet - mainly because my sim is at work in the M11x.

Overall mint has been totally stable - have all the graphics running (cube, wobbly windows etc) seems totally rock solid. Have 50gig free (runcore 64gig SSD) bog std install.

[grassle]

have all the graphics running (cube, wobbly windows etc) seems totally rock solid

Does that slow down the system to a noticeable extent?

[Isthmus]

Originally Posted by grassle

Does that slow down the system to a noticeable extent?

on my 1012 it caused a little lag. I only run some effects, on mine, but not the full spectrum.

[grungysquash]

Originally Posted by grassle

Does that slow down the system to a noticeable extent?

Not really - does make it run hotter!!! but overall it seems to not affect it to any great extent. I have 2gig ram installed along with the runcore drive so the unit is about as "high" spec'ed as you can have a mini 9.

Interesting I find the flash videos tend to run far better on the mini 9 linux than they do on the M11x (both running firefox 3.6.8) - seems flash and win 7 don't mix very well.

[reflex]

Originally Posted by grungysquash

Interesting I find the flash videos tend to run far better on the mini 9 linux than they do on the M11x (both running firefox 3.6.8) - seems flash and win 7 don't mix very well.

Something has to be misconfigured/broken/etc on your m11x, a slow Atom CPU and Adobe's lesser Flash on Linux shouldn't win. Maybe it has to do with the graphics card switching?

[grassle]

Thanks for the speed info