Mint
Mint is a Linux operating system based on Debian. According to the Linux Mint developers, “the main purpose of Linux Mint is to innovate and constantly bring the best desktop solutions to its users”.
Origin – Home Page: Ireland – Mint
Desktops: Gnome, KDE, and Xfce
Price: Free and Open Source
Installer: Mint boots into a LiveCD environment and like most LiveCD distros, you may install to hard disk after test-driving it. The installer is pretty basic, and provides a seven-step process to install the operating system and other applications on the hard disk. There are very few advanced options. The only “advanced” options available are the options to manually partition the disk, and to specify the location of the boot loader.
Logical Volume Management (LVM) and RAID support are lacking, as is the option to encrypt disk partitions. If you looking for a desktop Linux distro with an installer that supports these advanced features, we recommend Fedora, Sabayon, and Debian. For a server distro that has support for these advanced features, Cent OS or Startcom, in addition to Debian, Fedora, and Sabayon, are excellent choices.
Multimedia/Internet: With libdvdcss2 installed, Totem (the default movie player), and VLC will play any commercial (encrypted) DVD videos. For playback of audio files and audio CDs, Rhythmbox is the preferred application. Firefox 3 is the only Web browser installed, and it can – out of the box – play flash files, but not quicktime, or other multimedia content commonly embedded in Web pages.
Productivity/Utilities: OpenOffice.org is installed by default. OpenOffice.org is a modern office application just like Microsoft Office. The major difference, and it’s a huge one, is that OpenOffice.org is free and open source. Mint installs all the stock desktop utilities commonly found on any Linux desktop operating system.
Security: The Linux kernel has a built-in firewall, but not all Linux distros ship with a graphical frontend to configure and manage it. Mint belongs to that group. By default, Mint installs Ufw, a text-based management tool for iptables, the Linux firewall, but unless you are comfortable with managing iptables from the command line, we recommend that you install any one of several gui frontends available in the default repository.
Games/Graphics: Mint is the only Linux distro that does not install any game application by default. But that’s not a reason to not like it, because you can install any game that you want, including some of the 3D games that comes pre-installed in Sabayon, using Synaptics, the package manager. For graphics, GIMP and OpenOffice.org Draw are the only ones installed.
Administration: Mint has several graphical tools that makes managing a Mint system easier for noobs and expert users alike:
- In addition to Synaptics, the graphical frontend to apt-get, mintInstall is another software management tool for Mint
- Like OzOS, Mint has a Web-based software portal for searching for and installing (via mintInstall) software packages not already installed in the system
- mintBackup is a simple gui tool for creating backups of your personal data
- APTonCD makes it easy to create backups of all the cached packages installed via apt-get to CD/DVD or iso image, or to restore those packages back to cache
- Mint provides a gui tool for viewing the system log files. No need to dig into the file system to check log files
Miscellanea: Mint ranks atop the list of Linux desktop operating systems that we recommend for those looking for a distro that just works and is noob-friendly. It boots and loads applications just as fast as Zenwalk, and has more user-friendly administrative tools than Zenwalk. If you are new to Linux, looking for a good desktop distro, and do not need to have LVM or RAID configured, this is the desktop we recommend. On the other hand, if those features and other advanced features that the Mint installer lacks are important to you, then your best options are either Fedora, Sabayon, or Debian.
Here are the improvements that we expect to see in the next release of Linux Mint:
- NTP should be configured out of the box, or at least provide the option to enable it during the installation process
- A graphical interface to Iptables, the Linux firewall, should be installed and enabled out of the box
- Games – please
- The current installer needs to be replaced with one that has more user-configurable options. The simple, 7-step installer that Mint uses is just not good enough. The Debian or Sabayon installers are good ones to emulate
- Firefox should be loaded with the plugins needed to properly render any multimedia content most commonly found on the Web
Download Separate iso images for Gnome, KDE, and Xfce are available for download.
