• Toolz
  • #! Die-hard
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  • From: Asia
  • Registered: 2009-02-02
  • Posts: 937

Topic: Twelve hours with Linux Mint

Okay it's not twelve hours. I dual-booted Mint 7 with WinXP for about a month just after it came out. Then on Sunday I got into some bother, I intended to install Karmic alpha 4 on this machine and use as my main OS but first I wanted to play with PCLXDE for a while. PCLXDE was a big mistake which I don't want to go into - let's just say it has an abomination of an installer - specifically the partitioning stage.

I was in something of a pickle with nothing on any of my flash drives except for one Mint 7 from a few months ago. I dug it out and installed it.

At first it was like an old friend. I love the way Fat32 and NTFS partitions mounted. And ... I think I liked a few other things but I can't recall right now.

Then things started bugging me. I wanted a 'Run', just like Crunchbang has. Whereever I put it in the 'Main Menu' config utility it just wouldn't appear. Eventually I buried it under 'Accessories'. Then I wondered why every time I opened Package Manager - it appears prominently in the main 'MintMenu' - it wouldn't open - I got this awful error message saying someone was trying to grab my mouse. Then there was Package Manager itself - I wanted the good old Ubuntu style, where I could choose the country for the repos and add PPAs in the nice 'deb url dist cat' format'. And one small request: I wanted to modify the date/time display in the tray so it took less space - showing only hours:mins - but showing full date + seconds in a tool tip. Very easy to do in LXPanel.

I couldn't find the answers, so just 12 hours ago I signed up to the Linux Mint forums and started asking. And ... I'm serious guys/gals, it was torrid!

Exhibit A:

Tooltip for date/time in tray ... With LXPanel I can have just the time in hours and minutes displaying in the tray then have the tooltip display full date and time with seconds. Any way to do this with the Gnome panel?

See the repetition of 'tooltip'? Answer I got was:

LinuxMint wrote:

"Right click on the time and date and select "Preferences"."

Hum ... anyone familiar with the Gnome panel will know there's nothing about tooltips in there.

Exhibit B:

Configure Menu ... This is not mainly about the 'Main Menu' application - although I have had some trouble with that.

I would like to edit the 'System' menu - adding a few more entries - at least one for Gmrun anyway - and probably hiding 'Places'. Any idea how I add entries?

I got the reply:

LinuxMint wrote:

"System>Preferences>Main Menu or, alternatively, Control Center>Main Menu."

Hum ... I thought I said *not* about the 'Main Menu'...!

No matter, I did slightly insult Mint's 'MintMenu' and from there I got well and truly flamed. This was in the 'Newbie' forum.

Looked at the latest posts of my attacker and got:

"Yeah, lately I find myself loosing my cool when it comes to that ... I was a n00b once myself, as were we all. But these darned kids today.. they're just hopeless ... And I wish they'd stay off my lawn"
...
"There should be a sticky FAQ for n00bs filled with links to write-ups like this. Make it required reading - no posting ability until they've accessed it at least 10 times."
...
"The problem as I see it are lazy users who come to the forum wanting their hands held. They cannot be bothered to read more than one sentence at a time, and many of them seem even incapable of understanding plain English. ... +1 We get enough of them as it is."
...
"That question has been asked & answered countless times ... How attention deficit are you? I link directly to an answer in my last post ... Here I'm confronted with two idiots ... you can take your opinions and blow them out your ass"

I wonder if he's Asa Dotzler! smile

In the first page of results, this member who loved to hang out in the 'Newbie' forum never posted anything approaching constructive help. The header at the top of every post in the 'Newbie' forum says:

There are no such things as "stupid" questions.

What a strange community! I remarked before on this (Crunchbang) forum how Google search never turned up useful answers for Linux Mint problems. And now I know why I like Crunchbang and why I've managed to stick around for nearly 500 posts! smile

...

Oh ... For the serious-looking error telling me my mouse was being grabbed I managed to find the solution using the search facility. smile

  • Registered: 2008-12-13
  • Posts: 1,480

Re: Twelve hours with Linux Mint

From what I've seen I like some of the tools they've developed, but I'm happy with #!. Hopefully you just had a bad experience and isn't normal there. I do find the comment about speaking english offensive though, speaking english isn't a requirement to use linux.

I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.
  • Toolz
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  • From: Asia
  • Registered: 2009-02-02
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Re: Twelve hours with Linux Mint

Another thing I noticed: All the high posting/frequent posting members were registered in the middle of 2009. How long has Mint been going? They have a problem over there.

  • From: Deep in The Swedish Woods
  • Registered: 2008-11-28
  • Posts: 578

Re: Twelve hours with Linux Mint

Hi there!
I have been VERY active in the Mint forums for quite some time, and the response you got is very rare imo.
However, since the exploding growth of LM since the release of Gloria(LM 7), more and more sour grapes have entered the forum and been spewing out all sorts of weird crap - sad, but expected with rapid growth I'm afraid.

BTW my favorite Mint version is the XFCE CE - well worth a try!

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  • Toolz
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  • Registered: 2009-02-02
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Re: Twelve hours with Linux Mint

Yeah I could see your encouraging posts in the XFCE branch! I guess you did the artwork? Is the final release due any day now?

  • From: Deep in The Swedish Woods
  • Registered: 2008-11-28
  • Posts: 578

Re: Twelve hours with Linux Mint

Toolz wrote:

Yeah I could see your encouraging posts in the XFCE branch! I guess you did the artwork? Is the final release due any day now?

Yes, the Gloria artwork is made by me!(proud!) big_smile cool
And yes LM 7 XFCE should be released as of now. smile

Last edited by Zwopper (2009-08-25 20:46:04)

My artwork at deviantART   |    My Tweet   | My upcoming web page
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  • Registered: 2009-05-13
  • Posts: 161

Re: Twelve hours with Linux Mint

I know the Mint community well and though i dont post much over there i stay in there irc channel very often. And for the Most part they are good people. I know i lot of people there are very helpful ( like here ) , if you have any more trouble just go to the irc channel  irc.spotchat.org  /join #linuxmint

  • qbrick
  • #! CrunchBanger
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  • From: Hannover, Germany
  • Registered: 2009-07-20
  • Posts: 199

Re: Twelve hours with Linux Mint

I used Mint 7 before I discovered #!.
I liked their artwork and the simplicity of setting up a box with codecs and stuff.
It somehow felt like being at home - until I heard of the political twaddle about politics in the near-east.
Not only that I was adverse to the position mentioned by the head of the project, I found it really disturbing to bring an seperating element of politics into the community. The half-arse excuse that followed didn't make it better.

  • aim
  • #! CrunchBanger
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  • From: Christchurch, New Zealand
  • Registered: 2009-07-26
  • Posts: 226

Re: Twelve hours with Linux Mint

I didn't like the OS itself... But found the community to be rather helpful.

I think you're experiencing an unfortunate random occurance...

  • Toolz
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Re: Twelve hours with Linux Mint

The general level of expertise and knowledge I found to be quite low. I think they're all cocooned with their shiny Mint tools (btw Iggy which ones did you like?). On here there's a lot of discussion on the lines: "well you could user this panel or that panel" and weighing up pros and cons and answers actually get quite complicated. Over there they just seem to be stuck with their defaults and accept any shortcomings.

Early on there was a discussion about the Wikipedia entry for Linux Mint. One asked if anyone had a Wikipedia account so they could fix it. The only reposte was: "It's not exactly hard to sign up with Wikipedia and do it yourself" ... roll

  • From: Florida, Occupied C.S.A.
  • Registered: 2009-04-25
  • Posts: 291

Re: Twelve hours with Linux Mint

I had one very brief tryst with Mint, which ended when it got "politicized." But Mint was gorgeous and functioned well, except verrrrry slow. Much slower than Ubuntu had. I asked about it on their forums and the standard reply was "it's an upstream issue (read: Blame Ubumtu)."

"But Ubuntu ran much faster on the same computer. It must be something else," I appealed.

That simple thing elicited a "don't feed the troll" response and I was done with their forums, but I lurked and googled and never did find out why Mint was such a resource hog on my machine compared to Ubuntu. Discovered Crunchbang soon afterwards, much to my delight.

The political thing with Mint has been a deal breaker for a lot of folks too (including me) as well.

DixieDancer's Website

  • omns
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  • Registered: 2008-11-25
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Re: Twelve hours with Linux Mint

I don't understand what 'politicised' means. Mint in my experience is a really nice distro. I used it for some time and was quite involved with Zwopper in its Artwork Teams activities. I haven't visited the forums for a while but have always found its members to be friendly,  helpful and keen to explore new concepts. Maybe the conversations aren't as quirky and as adventurous as they are here but I can't recall ever having a negative experience there.

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Silence is sometimes the best answer - Dalai Lama.
  • Toolz
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  • Registered: 2009-02-02
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Re: Twelve hours with Linux Mint

I reported the most recent of the offensive posts i dug up - the bottom one of the several excerpts separated by '...' in my first post contains the worst bits - and I received a very satisfactory response from the moderator. It was really above and beyond the 'necessary' response. smile

As far as flaming in the Newbie branch goes, it's possible I just joined at the wrong time.

  • Registered: 2008-12-13
  • Posts: 1,480

Re: Twelve hours with Linux Mint

I guess one of the lead developers(the lead?) made some public comments through mint channels that were political in nature(I believe to do with Isreal), if he had made the comments through a private channel it would have been fine but he associated his personnel beliefs with mint(correct me if I'm wrong, I just remember reading some articles about it). As far as the tools I haven't used any of them, but the file sharing tool looked nice and some of the other tools looked nice in the reviews but I can't remember them now.

I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say lets evolve, let the chips fall where they may.
  • Toolz
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Re: Twelve hours with Linux Mint

iggykoopa wrote:

As far as the tools I haven't used any of them, but the file sharing tool looked nice and some of the other tools looked nice in the reviews but I can't remember them now.

Yeah that'll be MintUpload and MintSpace - I still haven't used them but they look interesting.

Zwopper, I still haven't found XFCE final. As soon as I can download that it's going on here...

  • omns
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  • Registered: 2008-11-25
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Re: Twelve hours with Linux Mint

iggykoopa wrote:

I guess one of the lead developers(the lead?) made some public comments through mint channels that were political in nature.

Ah yes, I remember that now. Hopefully things have settled down for them again. I believe he made an apology for that which should be enough but sadly often isn't for some people.

A Creative Commoner | My images at Google+ | A Waldorf Review

Silence is sometimes the best answer - Dalai Lama.