Monday, September 14, 2009

Taking the Penguin Plunge - I installed Linux Mint

Having grown tired of waiting forever for Vista to respond to anything I want to do, I decided to give Linux Mint 7 a try, something I'd been meaning to do for a while now. It proved to be as fast running from the CD as Vista is running from my hard drive and every piece of hardware I have works with it smoothly, from the entire assortment of hotkeys to  the wi-fi and mobile broadband.

Amusingly, the most annoying/difficult part of the installation was trying to get Vista to shrink its partition to make space for the Linux ones. Ultimately I had to boot into safe mode to get around the cryptic access denied errors Microsoft so helpfully provides. Pretty much everything else was automatic; Mint's setup created my user account (and could have imported my one from Windows, if I were so inclined), had most of the software I needed right from the get-go, and provided a welcome screen to explain anything I might have needed help with.


I've been using the OS all weekend now and I'm still extremely happy with it. Everything is significantly more responsive, sometimes almost too much so; I keep having to disable the touchpad since it is a little too sensitive now. :)  As I migrate things over to Linux I may end up dropping the Vista partitions entirely and just going for broke with Mint, but that's something I won't decide on for a couple months, just in case something suddenly goes awry.

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