The Linux Mint distribution has gained a reputation over the years as a powerful and user friendly desktop operating system. The project takes packages from the Ubuntu repositories and adds its own utilities, themes and customizations to create a distribution which is designed to perform most tasks out of the box. The Mint team has also pleased many people by adjusting their distribution to fix perceived problems with the underlying Ubuntu packages. Where Ubuntu tends to be experimental -- switching from using the GNOME desktop to introducing Unity and adding advertisements to the desktop -- Mint tends to walk a more conservative line. The Mint distribution maintains a classic style of desktop and tends to avoid revolutionary changes or eye-catching effects. The latest offering from the Mint team, version 15, was released in May and is based on the Ubuntu 13.04 repositories. Mint is offered in two basic flavours, one which comes with the Cinnamon desktop environment and the other ships with the MATE desktop. Both flavours can be downloaded either with or without third-party software which may be subject to non-free software licenses or patent laws. Each edition of Mint is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit builds and the download images are approximately 1GB in size. I decided to take the 32-bit MATE edition of Mint for a spin.
Looking over the release notes for Linux Mint 15, code named "Olivia", we find this is a fairly tame update to the Mint lineup. This release of Mint includes EFI boot support, the MATE desktop has been updated to version 1.6 and Cinnamon has been bumped to version 1.8. The login manager has gained some new features, including support for HTML 5 features, which means users will be able to make their login screen as ugly and interactive as they wish. The new Mint comes with two new utilities. The first is a Software Sources tool which replaces Ubuntu's repository configuration tool. Mint also adds a new application, called Driver Manager, which makes it easier to add new drivers and find hardware support in the distribution's repositories. The latest 32-bit build of Mint comes with a kernel which requires PAE support in the computer's CPU. While this won't be a problem for most users, people running older hardware without PAE support are advised to use Mint's most recent long term support release which will receive security updates for the next four years.
Booting from the Mint disc quickly brings us to the MATE desktop. In the background we see the Linux Mint branding. Icons sit on the desktop, giving us access to the file browser and system installer. The application menu and task switcher sit at the bottom of the display. Mint uses the Ubuntu installer and I found it worked quite well. The installer confirms we have at least 6.3GB of free space available on the hard drive before we are allowed to proceed. From there we are quickly walked through partitioning the hard drive, confirming our time zone and our keyboard's layout. We are asked to create a user account and asked whether we would like to encrypt the files in our home directory. I've said it before, but I think it bears repeating: the built-in partition manager used by the Mint (and Ubuntu) system installer is really quite friendly and flexible. We can easily make use of Btrfs, XFS, JFS, ext2/3/4 or Reiser file systems and LVM layouts are available. For my trial with the distribution I opted to use a Btrfs volume.
Once the installer has finished copying its files to the local hard drive we are prompted to reboot the computer. Loading my local copy of Mint for the first time brought up an error message saying "sparse file not allowed" and the boot process stopped for several seconds. This error is related to Btrfs and also cropped up during my trial with Ubuntu 13.04. Simply waiting a few seconds gets us past this error message and on to the graphical login screen. The aforementioned login screen is decorated with a pretty blue sky and clouds. Signing in brings us back to the MATE desktop and a welcome window appears. This window contains links to the project's forums, documentation, hardware database and other key information resources where users can get assistance. Shortly after I had dismissed the welcome window an icon appeared in the lower-right corner of the screen letting me know security updates were available. Clicking on this icon brings up the mintUpdate application. The update app shows us a list of newly available packages waiting in the repositories. Next to each upgradeable package we see the version number of the package currently installed, the version available in the repositories and the package's size. We are also shown the package's safety rating, a number in the range of 1-5 which lets us know how likely the update is to disrupt the operating system's functionality. The same day Mint 15 was released I found 27 updates waiting to be installed, totaling 29MB in size. Both that first day and for the remainder of the week I found all updates downloaded and installed without any problems.
Exploring the green and silver themed desktop I found MATE was quite responsive and the desktop feels both familiar and clean. MATE provides a traditional desktop environment and, after the initial welcome screen, the system generally stays out of our way. The distribution comes with a custom menu which organizes items into three categories. The menu contains locations, such as our home directory; system settings and applications. The application menu allows us to switch between viewing our favourite (or most commonly used) applications and showing all installed applications. The menu also comes with a search feature to help users locate programs. Digging through the menu we find a collection of popular software, including the Firefox web browser, the Thunderbird e-mail client and LibreOffice. We also find the Pidgin instant messaging client and the Transmission bittorrent client. We're provided with the Banshee audio player, the VLC multimedia player, the Totem video player and the Brasero disc burning software. I installed the build of Mint which comes with codecs and Flash and found these provided a complete multimedia experience with no work required on my part. We're given a PDF viewer and the GNU Image Manipulation Program and a small app for uploading files to remote computers. The MATE desktop comes with a central Control Centre which allows users to tweak most aspects of the graphical interface and access various administrative tools. In the toolbox we find a simple backup app, a domain blocker and a firewall configuration program. There are also utilities for managing system services, handling printers and working with user accounts. Two new programs have appeared in Mint, one for managing software sources and another one for dealing with drivers and I'll cover those later. Mint also comes with text editors, note taking apps, a calculator and archive manager. The system comes with Java installed and developers will find the GNU Compiler Collection available out of the box. By default Network Manager runs and helps us get on-line. For users who require dial-up networking there is a package on the system which installs the GNOME PPP dial-up software. I'm not sure why this package isn't installed by default, but GNOME PPP and its dependencies are available on the disk and can be installed if we need it. Behind the scenes I found the Linux kernel, version 3.8.
For the most part the applications which came with Mint worked well for me. The configuration tools all worked flawlessly and were user friendly. I had little reason to complain. The one exception to my smooth sailing came from using the file browser. Opening a folder which contained sound files and clicking on of these audio files would cause the file browser to crash. It would also, incidentally, cause the audio file to be played in the background without any visible player. This means the user is stuck listening to the entire sound file unless they know how to identify and kill the process playing the file.
Mint comes with two graphical package managers. The first is called Software Manager and has a modern, icon-rich interface. Software Manager allows us to browse categories of software and takes an application-centric approach to locating packages. Clicking on a specific application brings up an information screen which shows us a detailed description of the package, user ratings, reviews and, for programs with graphical interfaces, a screen shot. Installing or removing software from the system is accomplished with the click of a button. Software Manager allows us to queue actions on packages and then continue to browse for other packages which makes for a nice, smooth experience. The other graphical front end for software management is Synaptic, the venerable package manager. Synaptic has a stronger focus on individual packages rather than programs and trades some user friendliness for speed. With Synaptic we can create batches of actions which will be all processed at once. I used both package managers and found they worked well. I didn't encounter any problems and both front ends worked quickly, giving me easy access to Mint's 41,000 software packages. The distribution pulls most of its packages from the Ubuntu repositories, but Mint also maintains its own repositories for the Mint-specific tools and proprietary software packages.
Earlier I mentioned a package for GNOME PPP is available on the system, but not actually installed. Accessing this dial-up software seemed like a good way to test Mint's new Software Sources utility. I launched the Software Sources program from the Control Centre and found it is nicely laid out. The program is basically separated into five sections. One screen handles our access to the main repositories and mirrors, the second lets us add or remove PPA repositories. The third screen allows us to add custom repositories to the system and the forth handles authentication keys. The final screen lets us launch repair or purge actions. I found access to locally stored packages could be enabled on the Additional Repository screen. From there I was able to open a package manager, refresh my repository data, search for GNOME PPP and add the package. It's important to manually refresh the repository data, otherwise the package manager will get confused and not be able to find the proper dependencies, as I discovered my first time through. The other new utility to be introduced in Mint 15 is the Driver Manager. This program is a small, simple application which simply shows us a list of drivers which may be of use to us. We can select the add-on driver we think will work best with our system and hit the Apply button at the bottom of the window. The Driver Manager does the rest, downloading and installing the driver for us. It appears to work well and I'm glad to see Mint introduce this tool after Ubuntu decided to awkwardly merge their own device driver manager into their repository configuration tool.
I ran Linux Mint on my desktop machine (dual-core 2.8GHz CPU, 6GB of RAM, Radeon video card, Realtek network card) and found the distribution performed very well. Boot times were short, the desktop was responsive and tasks completed quickly. Sound worked out of the box, my screen was automatically set to its maximum resolution and the system was stable. I found Mint, when running the MATE desktop, required approximately 200MB of memory. I also tried running Mint in a virtual machine, provided by VirtualBox, and found the distribution performed quite well there too. Again, the desktop was responsive and the operating system functioned without any problems.
After a week with Mint 15 I have to say I'm happy with most aspects of this release. It's easy to install, comes with lots of useful software, has a huge repository of additional packages and is really easy to navigate. We're given a familiar, traditional desktop which performs well and there are plenty of user friendly configuration tools. For a modern desktop operating system Mint is fairly light on resources and a nice balance is struck between assisting users and staying out of the way. Aside from the file browser crash I mentioned earlier I really couldn't find anything about which to complain. I like the package manager, I like the Control Centre and Mint ships with applications which are popular rather than applications which adhere to a certain policy or match a particular toolkit. Mint installed quickly and then let me get straight to work (or play) without complications. Mint 15 is somewhat limited by their upstream's shortened nine month support cycle, but otherwise this is an excellent release and I'm happy with the latest version of Mint.
# Distrowatch.com