Linux Mint

Today I installed Linux Mint 5 (Elyssa). Two years after using Kubuntu, this certainly feels like a breathe of fresh air. Beautiful artwork, all codecs built in with base platform of Ubuntu. Wonderful !

However, Mint comes with its own share of problems (at least on my machine)

1) My netgear wireless stick (MA111v2 with SIS chipset) still does not work. There are no native WLAN drivers.

I tried to load windows driver using ndiswrapper. I was successful in making kernel detect a wireless interface. But I could make it get valid IP address from my wireless access point. I tried all the tricks in my book (using iwconfig + dhclient + GUI network tools) and finally gave up by uninstalling ndiswrapper. Back to wired network !!

2) Pulse Audio server shipped with Mint (through Ubuntu 8.04) has serious issue of "sound stuttering". If any sound application (like Totem, VLC, Amarok etc) is playing sound, and then one tries to start any other application, sound momentarily stutters. I googled for this issue and found several users complaining. Hope they fix it soon.

Other than these two issues, it has been smooth sailing. Here are couple of screen shots of my machine for your viewing pleasure :-)