LINUX: It's official - Mint 17 "Qiana" released to distribution

[40hz]

It's heeeeeere!

Mint's latest and greatest (codename: Quina) has just been officially released to distribution in both 32 and 64-bit native versions. Cinnamon and MATE desktops are both available now. This is Mint's first LTS release (based off Ubuntu 14.04 "Trusty Tahr") which will receive security updates until 2019 and reflect Mint's new long-term strategy.

More here and here.

[Jibz]

That's great news, mint has worked well for testing here .

[ewemoa]

I get good use of their iso images as rescue / live usb tools

Getting the 64-bit Cinnamon image now.

[MilesAhead]

This time I'm downloading the x64 Mate version.  Just curious to see how it differs.

[40hz]

This time I'm downloading the x64 Mate version.  Just curious to see how it differs.

I'd appreciate you sharing your impressions on that. There's tons of comments and reviews of the Cinnamon version. Hardly anything of substance posted about MATE.

FWIW I tried MATE and decided that (for a full bells & whistles desktop at least) I preferred Cinnamon. It's what Mint is focusing the most effort into since 'spicegirl' is their baby. Probably why it somehow seems more polished. For really ditzing with desktop customizations (which I don't do very much these days) I'd probably be more inclined to start with some distro that favored KDE. KDE was made for tweaking.

Either way, if you do, let us know what you think about MATE.

[40hz]

Informal video walk-thru/review:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW_BOkrcjEY

[40hz]

Got 17/Qiana Cinnamon loaded on a test machine. I put it through its paces for a few hours and it's looking lovely. I'll probably test it a little more tomorrow - and likely install it on my main general productivity workstation sometime this week.

(Note: I'm not exactly happy with the systemd capitualation decision. But that's not a battle a non-dev is going to be able to fight let alone win.  "So it goes." as Kurt V so aptly put it.  )

[Deozaan]

I installed it on a VM and it crashes VirtualBox every time it tries to shutdown. I'm not sure what went wrong. VirtualBox is working just fine with my other VMs.

[Stoic Joker]

I installed it on a VM and it crashes VirtualBox every time it tries to shutdown. I'm not sure what went wrong. VirtualBox is working just fine with my other VMs.

At least it turns off when you tell it to. I just spent 10 minutes at a command prompt trying to kick mine to sleep in Hyper-V.

Apparently it doesn't much like the video driver, as it complained every step of the way that it couldn't access hardware acceleration. On boot it gave me a CLI login and refused to go graphical until I ran StartX. Then it loaded the desktop and promptly told me it really wanted hardware acceleration (GUI), and that the X server had crashed (CLI style error)...but then went right back to the desktop. O_o

Then I polked around for a bit and all seemed fine, but I had a rather narrow window of time to play with this thing ... So, time to shutdown and go back to work. Ha!

Apparently after hitting shutdown on the desktop it just starts a 60 second timer (WTF..?) that then closes the desktop...only. Shutdown had actually just dropped me back to a command prompt and then syntactically teased my until I stumbled the correct command to get the thing to exit ... Which it finally did do smoothly.

Booting from the "CD" (.iso actually) did not however exhibit any of these ill natured shenanigans.

[40hz]

FWIW running off the ISO or installed on real metal works just fine.

I wonder if something with the current version of upstart is causing big stones for virtual machines?

[dantheman]

Tried Cinnamon 64bit on SSD dual booting with Windows 7 and i find that Ubuntu loads a few seconds faster.
Used to be the opposite.

BTW, is there a way to perform searches in LM somewhat like the Ubuntu search that also does a Google search (while showing other things on computer etc.)?

[Stoic Joker]

FWIW running off the ISO or installed on real metal works just fine.

I wonder if something with the current version of upstart is causing big stones for virtual machines?

Realistic Expectations issue perhaps? Since everything else (network, sound, mouse, and keyboard) worked fine in the virtual environment - smooth guest/host transitions with no captured mouse issues - the OS's desire for hardware acceleration is fairly reasonable in this day and age. I'm assuming there is a setting somewhere that will quiet the video grumbling ... I just wanted to chime in on Deo's shutdown issue incase they were somehow related. I'm wondering when during the shutdown is the VM crashing. Is it during the graphical, transitional, or textual phase of the shutdown?

[40hz]

BTW, is there a way to perform searches in LM somewhat like the Ubuntu search that also does a Google search (while showing other things on computer etc.)?

There's a way to do anything in Linux. But Ubuntu's implementation of scopes and lenses which make that 'feature' available as part of Unity aren't something most other distros (and their users) will be anxious to copy.

[ewemoa]

BTW, is there a way to perform searches in LM somewhat like the Ubuntu search that also does a Google search (while showing other things on computer etc.)?

On a side note, I just installed kupfer on LM 17 and it provides a way to interface with search engines -- I don't know if it's quite what you're looking for, but FWIW:

 http://engla.github.io/kupfer/help/plugin-websearch.html

[dantheman]

Thank you ememoa! Will investigate.
The option to add search engines is interesting for sure! 

[ewemoa]

The option to add search engines is interesting for sure!  

It's particularly convenient if you happen to use FF's search engine integration capability  Though to get kupfer to pick up new additions via FF may be a little bumpy (for better detection consider restarting kupfer -- though there may be a way to manually trigger a rescan).

Good luck!

[ewemoa]

I installed it on a VM and it crashes VirtualBox every time it tries to shutdown. I'm not sure what went wrong. VirtualBox is working just fine with my other VMs.

Hmm, I just gave this a try a couple of times, but no crashing...this was after having done an initial update of packages.

FWIW, the VirtualBox here is 4.2.22 on Gentoo.

[Jibz]

I installed it on a VM and it crashes VirtualBox every time it tries to shutdown. I'm not sure what went wrong. VirtualBox is working just fine with my other VMs.

Hmm, I just gave this a try a couple of times, but no crashing...this was after having done an initial update of packages.

FWIW, the VirtualBox here is 4.2.22 on Gentoo.

No problems here either, running LM 64-bit inside VirtualBox on Win7.

[Deozaan]

I'm also running VirtualBox on Windows 7 x64. I'm not sure what the issue is. VirtualBox is running my previous Mint (15 XFCE) install just fine, as well as other VMs. But Mint 17 Cinnamon x64 is crashing VirtualBox each time it shuts down.

Maybe I need to update VB. I'm running 4.3.10 and it tells me 4.3.12 is available.

[40hz]

@Deo- don't forget the guest additions. Most times I have problems with VBox it's the guest additions that are responsible. And I almost always forget to update them.

[dantheman]

@ewemoa,

Kupfer shows much potential (first i've heard about it) but i'm probably missing something about shortcut (hotkey).
Invoking Kupfer (step 1) then step 2 and step 3 is one step too many compared to simply opening browser and search.

[ewemoa]

May be you'll find the triggers functionality to your liking (check out the examples):

 http://engla.github.io/kupfer/help/plugin-triggers.html

FWIW, there's also a "Google Search" plugin.


Actually, it doesn't look like it's possible to do what I was thinking.  IIUC, kupfer is inspired by the QuickSilver application, and IIRC, there it was possible to create a trigger (global shortcut) that invoked a command which let you type some text which if followed by Enter would perform a web search.  I didn't figure out how to do the comparable thing in kupfer unfortunately -- triggers exist in kupfer and it is also possible to create commands...however, it doesn't look like it's possible to create commands that when invoked allow you to type the text of your query (though you can make commands that operate on "selected text").

[Deozaan]

@Deo- don't forget the guest additions. Most times I have problems with VBox it's the guest additions that are responsible. And I almost always forget to update them.

I just tried a fresh re-install and attempted to install the guest additions. I'm not sure if it worked or not because I don't think I've ever done them before and all I found was a file on the CD that said Linux in the filename. I clicked it and told it to run in the terminal. The terminal popped open for a second, some text flashed across the screen, then it closed.

After that I decided to reboot the VM to see if anything was working any better. It crashed VirtualBox again. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that I'm picking "use LVM" in the installation options.

I'll try a fresh install one more time, this time without the LVM and see if that gives different results.

[ewemoa]

FWIW, I didn't use LVM.  Also, I think I may have used the following packages for guest additions via apt-get, synaptic, or equivalent:

 virtualbox-guest-x11
 virtualbox-guest-utils

May be 40hz can comment on whether that sounds appropriate.

[40hz]

May be 40hz can comment on whether that sounds appropriate.

On a virtual machine, I can't see any good reason to put your virtual drive(s) under an additional layer of abstraction. So no - I wouldn't use LVM in a VM. Others may feel differently. Or possibly have some reason to do so. But I couldn't think of any.

re:virtualbox-guest-x11 & virtualbox-guest-utils

I've got those two packages installed too.

I can't really comment from experience on how well VirtualBox works with Nix in a Wintel environment. Because I always try to stick to Microsoft's own virtualization software for Windows. To my mind, it's easier and safer to use whatever Microsoft offers - or go with VMware Workstation. (Especially since I bit the bullet and finally bought a copy.)