Author Topic: LINUX: Linux Mint 16 "Petra" just released (Read 44512 times)

dantheman · « **Reply #25 on:** December 04, 2013, 01:15 PM »

Now i understand your initial enthusiasm.
Glad to hear about you finding that free gem!
Lucky guy!

For some reason, standby or hibernate modes don't like my little ol' machine.

40hz · « **Reply #26 on:** December 04, 2013, 01:41 PM »

@Dan - I think these may mostly be issues with a specific laptop's hardware.

I have Mint 14 running on a Dell Inspiron where the restart option doesn't work correctly. It always hangs on shutdown. Since I can just do a regular shutdown + hit the power switch to restart (and logoff session works fine) I haven't bothered to try and get to the bottom of it.

Sometimes you just need to weigh the effort required in light of solving one glitch on one machine. As I get older I get lazier when it comes to my own PCs.

rgdot · « **Reply #27 on:** December 04, 2013, 03:01 PM »

Not that a new version of LM will fix wifi issues necessarily but may be I should burn 16 and see if it is better than 13...

40hz · « **Reply #28 on:** December 04, 2013, 03:28 PM »

Not that a new version of LM will fix wifi issues necessarily but may be I should burn 16 and see if it is better than 13...
-rgdot (December 04, 2013, 03:01 PM)

Interesting...one of the first things that swayed me towards Mint as a general purpose and new-user distro was how well it worked with wifi. At least for me. Guess it's yet another example of how YMMV when it comes to Linux...

dantheman · « **Reply #29 on:** December 09, 2013, 08:41 AM »

40hz,

If you can help out on this, i'd appreciate it!
1. i find graphics grainier than say, PCLinuxOS (changing monitor settings doesn't do anything to improve).
2. how to change font and even better, make title bars disappear (or autohide) in Firefox for example?
I've got "toolbar autohide" which works just fine in Windows but not on Linux Mint Cinnamon 16.

rgdot · « **Reply #30 on:** December 09, 2013, 10:36 AM »

Not that a new version of LM will fix wifi issues necessarily but may be I should burn 16 and see if it is better than 13...
-rgdot (December 04, 2013, 03:01 PM)

Interesting...one of the first things that swayed me towards Mint as a general purpose and new-user distro was how well it worked with wifi. At least for me. Guess it's yet another example of how YMMV when it comes to Linux...

-40hz (December 04, 2013, 03:28 PM)

At least partly a case of which wireless card is in there. If it was a desktop I would be willing to change any or all components to fit but laptop less so. Even with firmware update, wireless card not soldered and compatible replacement it's still hit and miss in my (limited) experience.

40hz · « **Reply #31 on:** December 09, 2013, 01:14 PM »

40hz,

If you can help out on this, i'd appreciate it!
1. i find graphics grainier than say, PCLinuxOS (changing monitor settings doesn't do anything to improve).
-dantheman (December 09, 2013, 08:41 AM)

@DtM - I'll try.

Without knowing your hardware configuration, there's not much I can suggest other than to say it sounds like the screen resolution is being set incorrectly or the video driver you're using is generic and your GPU doesn't like it.

If you have an NVidia card there have been documented problems with some of the drivers recently.

How about a little more detail: screen type, native resolution, graphic system etc.?

You can run inxi -Gx in a terminal window to see what Mint thinks you have running. If there's a mismatch, that's where we'll need to start looking.

2. how to change font and even better, make title bars disappear (or autohide) in Firefox for example?
I've got "toolbar autohide" which works just fine in Windows but not on Linux Mint Cinnamon 16.

Never used Toolbar Autohide before, but I just installed it. (Nice add-on btw!) Once I did I had to put the cursor in the toolbar area, right click and put a checkmark for Maximized Autohide. Works like a charm for me.

Let me know if it does for you.

dantheman · « **Reply #32 on:** December 09, 2013, 02:08 PM »

Here it is :
Graphics: Card: NVIDIA G96M [GeForce GT 130M] bus-ID: 01:00.0
X.Org: 1.14.3 drivers: (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) FAILED: nouveau Resolution: [email protected]
GLX Renderer: Gallium 0.4 on NV96 GLX Version: 3.0 Mesa 9.2.1 Direct Rendering: Yes

(something is missing or failing).

That Toolbar Autohide is working just fine. Here it is at work:

http://imageshack.us/scaled/modthumb/163/hz66.png

LINUX: Linux Mint 16 "Petra" just released

Uploaded with ImageShack.us
I've got the LM panel sent to the top, could this have an impact?
Thunderbird behaves in same manner.
Not very nice when you a black theme and nice long greyish horizontal bar.

dantheman · « **Reply #33 on:** December 09, 2013, 04:45 PM »

BTW, glad i could have been of some use to you 40hz!
It's odd that Chromium has the option to hide system title bar and borders.
Guess Dedoimedo is right on his recent rant about Mozilla ?

Shades · « **Reply #34 on:** December 09, 2013, 06:05 PM »

Have been trying Mint 16 Cinnamon (64-bit) in VirtualBox version 4.3.2 (portable edition) but it isn't that stable to be honest, not nearly as stable as ElementaryOS 0.2 (Luna).

In my VirtualBox setup (both VirtualBox and Mint use the default settings) Mint really starts behaving crazy when I try to play a DVD. I'm not blaming Mint all the way for this behavior as it could be the DVD itself (yeay, misusing DVD book conventions for the DRM beast).

Have not been able to successfully connect my USB hard disk to the virtual machine in VirtualBox, perhaps I should try a different file manager that supports SMB:// better. For some (strange?) reason the default manager doesn't find my Windows shares.

I did install VLC into Mint, even after downloading and installing each requested package the DVD would pass through its menu system and plays the first minutes, but only in black and white, so I didn't check if the DVD plays completely, to be honest. Closing VLC crashed the virtual machine with Mint. The virtual machine with ElementaryOS, VLC and the DVD didn't crash after closing VLC, but VLC kept playing the movie in black and white as well. Also in this VM all the requested packages were installed.

The DVD is 'The Life and Death of Peter Sellers'.

Browsing the internet and all that kind of stuff went well in Mint, however the default fonts the default browser used, I didn't find that nice to look at. As I have seen websites in other linux distro's (CentOS and Fedora) display text of a website more clearly than Windows PC's years ago, I know this can be better. ElementaryOS does this (only marginally) better.

My Windows host machine uses an AMD Radeon 4650 video card (old, but very reliable and it has 1GB of RAM on it). The rest of my PC is from the same "computer epoch", so that could be the reason for instability as well

40hz · « **Reply #35 on:** December 09, 2013, 06:25 PM »

Graphics: Card: NVIDIA G96M [GeForce GT 130M] bus-ID: 01:00.0
X.Org: 1.14.3 drivers: (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) FAILED: nouveau Resolution: [email protected]
GLX Renderer: Gallium 0.4 on NV96 GLX Version: 3.0 Mesa 9.2.1 Direct Rendering: Yes

(something is missing or failing).
-dantheman (December 09, 2013, 02:08 PM)

@DtM - Looks like the Nouveau driver can't set the screen for the resolution given at the 60hz clock frequency. Try installing the NVidia control panel utility. It's in Software manager. Do a search for nvidia-settings. Hopefully a tweak there will solve the problem. If you need to manually replace a driver, post a message on the Mint forum since that can get a little hairy if you need to remove the old one first.

But first check <System Tools><System Settings> and scroll down to the hardware section. Open the Device Drivers panel and see if there's a proprietary driver available for your video subsystem that needs to be enabled.

dantheman · « **Reply #36 on:** December 09, 2013, 07:04 PM »

@40zh

That's better!
Went to the nvidia319 (recommended) in settings, rebooted things look better.
Thanks!

whippy · « **Reply #37 on:** December 10, 2013, 04:12 AM »

well it looks good ,
I have been using mint13 cinnamon for sometime , So how does one update to newer version without losing all settings ?

dantheman · « **Reply #38 on:** December 10, 2013, 05:23 AM »

This tutorial seems to have made some happy people:
http://community.lin...com/tutorial/view/62

40hz · « **Reply #39 on:** December 10, 2013, 02:50 PM »

This tutorial seems to have made some happy people:
http://community.lin...com/tutorial/view/62
-dantheman (December 10, 2013, 05:23 AM)

Just be careful with doing that. Ubu-based distro upgrades don't always have happy endings when doing an apt-get-distro-upgrade. A lot of times you'll have a semi-broken or flaky system afterwards if you have a lot of libraries loaded from ppas as opposed to the official repositories. And especially if any of those ppas are Ubu version specific (i.e. there's one for Ubu Raring, one for Saucy, etc.) Those will all need to be manually updated to the correct versions before you run do a distro upgrade using apt if you want to avoid problems down the road.

Best bet is to backup your data (Note: most but not everything will be in the home directory so make sure you know where your apps store their data! Same thing goes for Windows upgrades btw.), have apt give you a list of what's installed, make a copy of your repository info - and ideally make a disk image of your entire machine in case total disaster strikes and you need to get back to where you were.

A clean or fresh "update" (i.e full clean replacement) is always your safest move.

It may be a pain, but it's a small pain that's worth putting up with where your own data is concerned.

(P.S. I've never had a real catastrophe going from one version or distro to another. But there's always a first time so I still go all "Sunday School" and take the most cautious and conservative approach whenever upgrading an OS. And that also goes for any upgrades I do with Windows, OSX, or BSD. Nothing is ever perfect - and "stuff" happens.

)

40hz · « **Reply #40 on:** December 10, 2013, 04:45 PM »

Another good review of Mint 16: Petra can be found here. Courtesy of the Linuxed blog ("Exploring Linux Distros"), it's well worth the read.

Linuxed is a good site to check before trying a new distro. They've saved a few downloads by identifying things that would be showstoppers for me.

dantheman · « **Reply #41 on:** December 11, 2013, 07:31 AM »

40hz, i believe the 'here' link is missing.
On the same wintery slope of reviews... i don't recall Dedoimedo ever so enthused about a linux distro here.

40hz · « **Reply #42 on:** December 11, 2013, 08:25 AM »

^thx Dan! Fixed now.

dantheman · « **Reply #43 on:** December 11, 2013, 12:13 PM »

No problem and... thank you for introducing me to another good linux webpage!

dantheman · « **Reply #44 on:** December 16, 2013, 08:14 AM »

I didn't really want to post this!
LinuxMint 16 Cinnamon installs the driver for the HP 1018 printer but it can never print anything.
Tried out Pinguy and there's no support for that printer either.
ElementaryOS (even if it keeps asking for user p.w. to install a driver at boot) works just fine.
Even if the later is nice and fast too, i still prefer LinuxMint Cinnamon.
Can't have your cake and icing.

40hz · « **Reply #45 on:** December 16, 2013, 10:55 AM »

I didn't really want to post this!
LinuxMint 16 Cinnamon installs the driver for the HP 1018 printer but it can never print anything.
Tried out Pinguy and there's no support for that printer either.
ElementaryOS (even if it keeps asking for user p.w. to install a driver at boot) works just fine.
Even if the later is nice and fast too, i still prefer LinuxMint Cinnamon.
Can't have your cake and icing.
-dantheman (December 16, 2013, 08:14 AM)

@Dan - before you get to this point:

Lets try installing hplip and hplip-gui using either Synaptic or the Mint Software Manager.

Then, from the start menu, go to <Preferences><HPLIP Toolbox> and try installing your printer from there.

Luck!

dantheman · « **Reply #46 on:** December 16, 2013, 12:14 PM »

@40hz!

I really wasn't expecting any kind of miracle to happen here, but you just made my day!
hplip was already there so i went onto the next step hplip-gui and there was one item missing.
Installed that, then went to preferences and the HP toolbox told me i was missing a driver i managed to download from 'recommended' option and it worked!!!

Woohoooh!!!

You should apply for a job a LinuxMint!

Muchos gracias hermano!

40hz · « **Reply #47 on:** December 16, 2013, 02:06 PM »

@Dan - de nada

As you get more familiar and comfortable with Mint and Linux in general, pay the favor back to the community by helping someone else. Thats what this 'thing' is (supposedly) all about.

Onward!

dantheman · « **Reply #48 on:** December 16, 2013, 03:04 PM »

That's what i always try to do 40hz.
In fact, i went over to LM forums, not only post link and text of your solution but also [Solved] in the header (proper étiquette).

Suppose the CanoScan LiDE70 is a hopeless case though.
But that's okay, i'm not into big scanning projects lately.

Edvard · « **Reply #49 on:** December 16, 2013, 08:15 PM »

I looked up the LiDE70 because I have a LiDE30 that works flawlessly, and you are correct. The LiDE70 uses a different set of hardware altogether (Phillips chipset) and Canon's attitude toward Linux has been *ahem*... less than charitable. I got my 30 at a thrift store for $5.99; I bet you could probably find a similar deal on a more compatible scanner. Take this page* with you on your phone or tablet for a quick check.

* http://www.sane-proj...t.org/sane-mfgs.html