Was genuinely tempted to try F16 last night but did a bit of googling and it's apparently already known that the ATI drivers are not compatible and won't be until at least the end of November.

So saved me a late night I guess

Call me shallow, but I love the wallpaper offered up by Fedora 16, pictured here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10...6_beta_review/

Sometimes I think these six-monthly releases the major distros are putting out are too much. What precisely changes between Fedora 15 and 16? There are a few incremental updates to a GNOME desktop that really should still be in beta, and a couple of version bumps for bundled software.

I would put forward that I don't see any reason for these frequent updates for all but the most ardent Linux fans. I maintain an office full of Ubuntu workstations at work and wouldn't dream of moving away from 10.04 LTS. It works solidly, and has had nearly two years of bugs worked out of it. I'm not sure what I'll do if I'm still working there in April 2013! I wouldn't move to the Unity-tainted 12.04 LTS; it seems like an easy way to confuse and piss off most of the staff. Debian stable would probably be top of my list.

Linux Mint 12 RC has now appeared for download at http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/linuxmint.com/testing/

Any idea what desktop it uses ? just regular gnome ?

http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1851

now there's tempting

although i'm in the middle of doing a full HDD wipe and re-install at the moment (not literally of course!!). Thought it might be an idea due to the sheer number of times i've re-formatted and installed various distros then restored my shadow image copy over the top.

*edit*

actually that probably means I can give Mint 12 a quick spin - i'm doing a full reformat anyway so one more distro won't kill me

mmmm... I'll wait a while before installing LM12.

Currently running it from the Live DVD, and both top and bottom panels are unreadable gibberish. I had to summon up a Terminal using the keyboard and start Firefox from there.

Probably something quite simple to fix but I'm not yet a master of the command line.

wvw.DistrosAnonymous.com

Yes, Fedora has some lovely walls, and this one is one of the loveliest imho.


Sounds like the ATI drivers strike again. Jason take note!

It's the elephant in the room isn't it? The DE devs want a nice new 3D desktop, but the open drivers aren't really up to it, leaving only the proprietary Nvidia ones able to deliver it. I really hope that the open ATI and Nouveau drivers improve soon.

OK with me so far, fingers crossed.

Any idea what the ! in the bottom right hand of screen should be doing?
Clicking on it for me just brings up a shadow transparent bar, cant do anything with it

Also whats the point in having tabs open up in the bottom and top bars when you open something?

Too late

I'm using Mint 12 now - completely unsurprised to find huge corruption all over the place with the ATI drivers. Top bar is a rainbow and lots of the icons are just static blurs.

it's an interesting way of doing it though - essentially sort of a hybrid of Gnome 2 and 3 with the top and bottom menus. Not sure I like the idea to be honest.

Ah well, at least i've tried it. Off to reformat the HDD now !

There's posts on the Ubuntu forums with screenshots, so I can picture what you're getting. Lots of people with the same problem.

/cuddles Nvidia

On the Mint note, I have to say, though I think it's a good idea what they're doing, the image I've seen looks a bit poor. It's going to take them some time to figure it out I think.

They're stuck at the moment, because the Mint raison d’etre is Ubuntu made easy, but now Ubuntu comes with codecs and whatnot at install time it couldn't realistically be any easier. They've overreacted to the overreaction by shunning Unity, which I think could be a mistake for them as Mint is what it is because of Ubuntu. They don't have the resources surely to go completely to a Debian base and start again. Might they have been better just creating an easier to use Unity? Yes I think so personally.

I was reading earlier how Clem (the dev) wants to create a desktop that the user still has a lot of control over. That's fair enough, but the Mint ethos conflicts with that a bit. People installed Mint in the past because they didn't have to do anything, not because they wanted total control of the desktop. For the home it was a fire-and-forget OS.

For me, while it might be the geek's friend at no.1 on Distrowatch currently, this is a hollow victory if they can't create something that is good for those users who don't want to fuss and just works out of the box. Because it seems to me that they are now aiming at making something that will be good for Linux users, and there's a gulf between the two.

it displays removable devices on mine

Now installed LM12 on the Mac, the graphics are perfect so far

Yep thanks, does on mine now as well, ran a update but still on live dvd.
Still not sure why we need icons of open things in the top and bottom bars at the same time.
Very early days in its dev yet though.


Hmm, not too sure i think the same as you do.

As you rightly say Mint was a Ubuntu with codecs etc installed by default, and yes its very easy on Ubuntu now as well.

But i always saw Mint as being, dare i say it ''windows like '' to use.

This is a major time in the Linux/Gnome world, so i think taking the chance now to break there reliance on Ubuntu is the right thing to do.

re distrowatcch ratings, i take no notice of them
http://www.muktware.com/news/2897

Well it certainly does not mean that there are more Mint users than Ubuntu!

I don't think I'm saying anything radical. It is a massive time of change for Linux desktops, but I still feel that distancing themselves from Ubuntu isn't necessarily a great idea. I do think that Gnome Shell is fantastic though, and I love what the Pinguy dev is doing with it. I just expected Mint to come up with something better, but to be fair I haven't tried it so can't say.

Only using it on live dvd myself, cant see me installing it over my Peppermint setup.

The Mint one is ok and has potential, but its to jumpy from Gnome 3 to old style MInt desktop, moving mouse around the screen, eg top left would totally confuse my wife, same reason i stayed away from KDE desktop.
Got fed up of wife saying whats it done that for

Do like look of
http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/6...space1016h.png
Looks 'traditional' one bar at top and small panel at bottom.
Would be intresting to see if poss to move bars around and add things like 'OFF' button to it?
She got fed up me saying the on<off button is now at the top not the bottom or side.

Would think the younger generation will take to Unity/Gnome3 in whatever shape or form it ends up in, win8 osx linux will/are all going the same looks wise, im a stick in the mud and like it as it is and makes life easy with the wife

Think I'll give it a couple of months before I try mint12. By then the bugs should be sorted. I'm using Pinguy 11.04 and Zorin 5 as my main systems at the moment. Both very stable and easy to use.

anyone ever used Gentoo linux ?

was nosing through winehq's appdb to kill some time and it seems like gentoo seems to be *the* distro for overall wine compatibility.

I think I speak for everyone here when I say, we were all waiting for you to try it, so we'd know not to bother.

Nah I've never tried it. I'm a very lazy user, don't like the fuss. I was playing with the Fedora 16 Gnome release Live earlier, and was quite impressed. Then I looked up how to install the Nvidia driver. It's not hard but I just can't be bothered!

Has anybody had any success installing Chakra Linux. The live distro's great but as soon as you try to install it .....it won't. It lets you partition the hd with root, swap and home then as soon as you click apply nothing happens. Which is a shame as it's a nice os based on arch. Though I usually prefer the debian based distros.

I did just boot to the live dvd and it all looked quite impressive - comes pre-loaded with a number of graphical interfaces (gnome, kde e.t.c..) but you have to install it manually apparently so the disk was quickly binned

I spent a "Jason Hour" on Crunchbang last night. Seduced by "Oh you can have a nice GUI" and "It boots in 10 secs".

Load of bollox.

Installed OK in VMWare. But then I was stuffed. Didn't know what to do.

Mebbe someone who knows what they are doing would fared better.

Not sure what you mean by "what to do". We had Crunchbang on our Eee for the longest time and it was brilliant. I only removed it because I thought I'd borked it up, when it turned out to be a broken keyboard. Otherwise we'd still be using it. Brilliant light OS.

Not sure if it is just an ATI thing I'm getting more or less the same with nvidia card pink panel at the top and blur of icons at the bottom the menu text is just a blur.

The above is before installing drivers after the drivers are installed I lose the panels and menu
and get left with a desktop with the two icons so completely unusable.

Is "Jason Hour" going to become the new terminology for the Linux community now if things don't go well ?