Your Problems Are Fixed in the Next Release: Mint 7

Back in January I posted about installing Ubuntu 8.10 on my dad's HP DV9000 laptop. There was also a followup to that post about DOSBOX .

At the end of the Ubuntu Install, and after using it for a few weeks, there were three issues:

1. Wifi: it worked, but with a work-around
2. DOSBOX was slower than DOSEMU, but DOSEMU required manual setup: Another workaround
3. On reboot, Dad had to hit enter about 30 times to get past various hangs being caused by the oddball ACPI on the DV9000. If I understood this correctly, it only showed up as a problem when the AMD CPU's were being used in the DV9000. Those are what Dad had of course...

I had tested the first two points at length with my research into Ubuntu 9.04: I knew that once I upgraded Dad's computer that those two issues would be resolved. I do not have an HP DV9000 though, so I had no way of verifying that the third point would be taken care of as well.

If you noticed the infrequency of my recent posting (both here and at BMC), you might have guessed I had been kidnapped by space aliens, but the truth is I was just working 70-90 hour weeks getting ready and implementing a data center migration. With that in the past, it was time to rest, and then to catch back up on all the other things I had been letting fall to the side.

In the mean time, not only had Ubuntu 9.04 GA'ed, but Mint 7 after that. I took both on USB fobs to Dad's house, and test booted both. Both worked fine: no ACPI hangs at all.

I talked about it with Dad, and we decided to put in Mint 7: Same as my brothers Linux system will be getting soon.

The install was straightforward, other than the install complaining about not having a swap partition. with 4GB of RAM, I just did not want to have to add an LVM to the boot disk in order to get the 5th partition on it. Dads disk already had 4 partitions: 2 NTFS (Vista and the recover partition) and 2 Linux: '/' and '/home'.

I set '/' to format, '/windows' as ntfs, and '/home' as ext3, and both to mount at boot. Once the gparted was done, it took about 4 or 5 minutes to install Mint 7.

Once up, we updated the packages, and installed DOSEMU.

DOSEMU, as delivered, configured the 'D' drive as /home/dad already, and the vbdos programs were already installed there, so it was a simple matter to cd to D, then to the programs, and then to run his NASA stuff.

What DOSBOX takes 30 seconds to run, DOSEMU takes 3. And it is graphical data, so Dad was interested in how to print it and screen capture it so it could be emailed. It turns out that this is easy under DOSEMU as well: Just full screen by clicking the center box on the upper right hand corner, and then fn-prtscrn, and Gnome pops up the screen, all captured and ready to save. A quick trip through GIMP to crop out the tool bars and the graphical display on the DOSEMU screen is ready to email or print to be added to a report.

One interesting thing: If we full screened the DOEMU window *before* we ran the program, then it would run more slowly: Maybe 20 seconds rather than 3. Faster than DOSBOX still, but much slower than EMU was normally. Dad made the easy decision to always run the programs first, then to full-screen them.

Everything works:

Display: Mint prompted for the install of the NVidia drivers, and we told it to go do it.

The Wireless stuff just works now.

We plugged in the HP printer, and Mint saw and configured it instantly. We also tried a Lexmark multifunction (resold by Dell), but that did not. I did not expect it to, since Lexmark printers are one of the few anymore that ship without Linux capabilities from the vendor.

Sound: The Altec Lansing speaker make all the right sounds: I am not sure that Altec Lansing should be claiming these speakers as theirs, but that is another story. They sound equally tinny on Vista. I fired up Rhythmbox and we listened to some Internet Radio for a bit.

Boot Speed: Fedora 11 is making a lot of noise about their new 20 second boot speed. I tested it, and on my desktop Dell 945, it is 30 seconds: Same as Mint 7 on Dad's DV9000.

Battery: This dv9000 is only 9 months old now, but Linux reported that its battery was only able to charge up to 80% of its design capacity: Something Vista was reporting as 100%.

And so forth: What a difference 6 months makes in Linux land. Dad was thrilled with the computer, and said that, other than to play a RealArcade game called WordSlinger, he did not see ever having to go back to Vista. I tried briefly to get that going under WINE, but it was acting very weird: Another thing to research!

Now in the Handy Hospital Size

This last week has been a very special week:

• On Monday, while chasing the overgrown puppy to keep her from escaping, my wife fell and broke her ankle.
• On Thursday, the doctor said “Going to have to make your wife bionic, I.E., install titanium plate and a number of screws”.
• Friday was spent in the day surgery ward
• And the subsequent weekend was about pain and dealing with a hard headed woman who wants no help from anyone, even when she can’t walk an inch.

I guess being stubborn is endearing at some level. Must be: I am hardly less so. But this isn’t about me....

My title for this is actually a reference to the Acer Aspire One (or AAO, sometimes apparently in blogspace the AA1).

Someone asked me why I use the AAO instead of the Macbook when I am out and about. That was a mistaken impression I had given because I was talking so much about the AAO (such as two recent posts here and here) and not at all about the MacBook. Most of the time the MacBook is with me in the backpack in case I need a real computer to do real work. The AAO, even with a real OS such as Mint rather than WinXP, is suboptimal for extended or serious work. This is mostly because the screen and keyboard, rather than the processor or RAM after the upgrade and with the efficient multitasking OS. (Aside: I have no idea why WinXP chokes on this computer when I try to do more than two things at once, but Linux doesn’t have the limitation, so XP stays unbooted most of the time, except when I am making sure it is fully patched or testing something with IE).

Still, one main reason to have the AAO was for exactly this last week. Lots of time is hospital waiting rooms, lots of getting up and moving from place to place. Lots of chances to pack and unpack the computer. With the AAO’s tiny size and weight, it is all a snap. And worst case, should the AAO be stolen from the waiting rooms while I am nearby but distracted by talking to a doctor, nurse, or what is happening to someone’s baby on “One Life to Live” (Monday in the ER waiting room was all soap day: I guess they didn’t have CNN or MSNBC available on that TV), then I am out the AAO and 350 USD, not the Macbook and my 3,200 USD (from three years ago, to be sure).

On Monday, after they were done putting on the temporary cast and giving me the bad news that the ankle was broken in such a way that they were referring it to a Ortho, the day nurse asked me that the cute little computer was. I replied that this was the “Handy hospital size”. She looked at it, impressed that computers came in such a thing as a hospital size. Then she looked at me with a bit of doubt, feeling correctly that someone nearby was probably pulling her leg. Only seemed fair after what was going on to my S.O.’s leg.

I should inject here that the hospital was/is Memorial Hermann, and that they had an open if slow access point in both the ER and the day surgery waiting areas. Nice. I should also say that compared to our last experience with a hospital emergency room that this whole level of care was much better. It was not without its issues, and it is crystal clear to me that there is both good and bad stuff going on in the US health care system. That is a whole other post.

Friday was more of the same in terms of waiting, and in terms of the utility of the AAO. It was very handy to be able to read all my email from work, and keep every one in the family status’ed on progress, as I learned it from the various members of the staff, or from direct observation. As I moved from check-in to pre-Op to waiting room to lunch to waiting room to post-Op to go-home-prep area, the AAO tagged along and allowed me to stay in touch, even in areas of the hospital where the cell phone was utterly at zero bars. The wifi was omnipresent at MH. The iPhone and the AAO were always in touch.

With every change of location, it was easy to close and tuck the little 2.2 pound laptop back into its Car-DVD-case-acting-like-a-laptop-case. Linux went into suspend mode almost immediately and always recovered (except for the sound server, which is always a goner after the first suspend and takes a reboot to get back. Not like I need that in the hospital though). If I was using the power cord, that took a bit longer to stow. The AAO comes with a long power cord. Good for waiting rooms when you may not be able to sit close to the outlet. With small default battery the AAO comes with, I was using the cord fairly often. I will be watching for a six cell battery for this thing like a hawk.

I supposed I could have done most of surgery day with just the iPhone and an external battery to keep it charged, but reading work email off the iPhone would entail using the craptastic Outlook webmail interface via Safari. Do-able. Not fun, and really not fun for an entire day, From that point of view, the AAO’s screen and keyboard look positively capacious.

While I was being silly with the ER nurse, it turns that in fact, the AAO (with Linux Mint 6) really is a handy hospital size.

Mint 6 RC1 on the Acer Aspire One

Mint 6 RC1 on the Acer Aspire One

Codenamed "Felicia",Mint 6 is due to arrive this month, and RC1 is already available over at http://linuxmint.com.

Mint 6 is built off the solid basis of Ubuntu 8.10, and inherits most of its goodness, and layers on the extras that make Mint my favorite Distro right now. I'll have a post up soon over at TalkBMC about using Mint 6 as the main office distro. This one is about Mint on the Acer Aspire One (AAO) though..

When we last left the AAO I had just added more memory and was experimenting with Puppy Linux. Since that time I have found that the power supplies for my Compaq M300's work on the AAO: Not great: the Compaq PS plug is slightly smaller in exterior diameter, but it fits well enough I can leave the real AAO power cord in the "car 11" DVDplayer" bag I bought to act as the AAO's case. I can have a power station on my desk, and another by the bed, and don't have to unpack the cord. Very handy. Kind of ironic, since the M300 sort of fit the same slot of computing hardware the AAO does.

A friend of mine told me that Mint 6 RC 1 was out, so I went and downloaded it to the MS Windows side of the AAO. The reason for this is that I have some handy tools for making bootable USB fobs over there on MS WIn that I got from the following tutorial on PenDriveLinux:

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2008/11/15/usb-boot-cd-for-ubuntu-810/

There is a sort of beauty to using MS Win to create Linux boot media.

I booted the AAO back over to WinXP SP 3. There I created a mint6 directory on the NTFS partition, and downloaded all the bits noted on the tutorial link above, plus the mint 6 .iso to the new mint6 directory. Next I modified the batch file there (inside the .zip download) and renamed it mint6.bat. The modification was just to change the two places inside the batch file that it refers to the .iso by name to point at the mint6 rc 1 .iso instead.

Then I inserted my USB fob.. that one that had Puppy 4.1.1 on it... formated it, and ran the new mint6.bat. This calls 7zip (7zip also is included in the .zip download) to unpack some stuff from the .iso {handy that 7zip understands .iso}), copies it to the USB fob, and makes the fob bootable with 'makeboot' (also included in the .zip download). It is clean and easy. Whoever created that .zip did all the work.

I have the AAO set to boot USB first by default, so I booted the USB key, and Mint 6 RC1 flew up. Fast. Amazing how much faster USB keys boot than CD's. I then clicked the install icon, and started the install process.

If you have ever installed Mint or Ubunbtu, there will be no mysteries on the install. Same set of screens. Same annoying graphical time zone setter (although it does seem to work a little better than it did, but not by much) When I got to the disk layout, I did the usual manual definitions since this system dual boots. Disk layout on the AAO looks like this in 'fdisk':

The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 19457.
There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024,
and could in certain setups cause problems with:
1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO)
2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs
(e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK)

Command (m for help): p

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x11a8ba38

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 637 5116671 12 Compaq diagnostics
/dev/sda2 * 638 4285 29302560 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 4286 5258 7815622+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 5259 19457 114053467+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 5259 5501 1951866 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda6 5502 19457 112101538+ 83 Linux

I really love that the AAO has a 160 GB hard drive. Since the Acer's box said that it was a 120 GB unit, I resent less that MS Win is taking up part of the space.

• SDA1 is the restore partition defined by Acer and more than likely made useless by this system being dual boot. 5 GB that will probably never be of use.
• SDA2 is MS Win XP SP3.
• SDA3 is '/'.
• SDA6 is 'home'.

I had Mint format sda3, and just told it to mount up the rest as is.

The installer then formated SDA3, and took less than 3 minutes to install the software, and less than three more to download language packs, and then it was time to reboot the system. Total install time was less that 10 minutes.

Up to this point, other than everything having the Mint theme, this was all like the Ubuntu 8.10 install before. This changed with the reboot. Ubuntu 8.10 and the wireless card.

Ubuntu required that I *unload* the Athero wireless drivers before the Atheros wireless card would work. Seems counter intuitive, but that is what worked.

With Mint 6 booted, it could not 'see' the wireless card, and so I assumed that the same thing would work for Mint. Nope. I unloaded and rebooted and Mint 6 still could not see the wireless card. I went round and round. It was odd. The hardware was clearly visible to lspci:

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR242x 802.11abg Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)

No drivers would work. This is not good, because Atheros is one of the good guys/companies when it comes to Linux, having fully released Open Source versions of their hardwares drivers.

http://www.atheros.com/news/linux.html

Weirder, this all worked under Ubuntu 8.10. If there was ever any doubt Mint is not the same Distro as Ubuntu, it is erased by things like this. This *is* RC1 though. I have no doubt that this will be fixed by GA, or shortly after: If nothing else, I have read the Ubuntu will be fixing the Atheros drivers in the hardware manager and Mint should pick that up.

This presented me with an opportunity though. Previous to this Mint had always supported my wireless cards so well I have never had a chance to play with their MS Windows driver install tool (System / administration / Windows Wireless Drivers). I know that NDISWrapper is the secret sauce behind this tool, and that is a little controversial in Linux circles. I agree that I would rather the Atheros native stuff be working, but it isn't, and I either need wireless to work, or I need to go back to Ubuntu 8.10. I decided to do NDISWrapper for now.

I pointed the tool at the Windows driver over in the MS Windows partition (cleverly mounted as /windows), and it does *not* activate the wireless card.

/windows/WINDOWS/system32/netathw.inf

It says that it see the hardware, but it does not create the wlan0 device.

Humm.. I grabbed some Atheros Drivers from here:

http://download2.dvd-driver.cz/atheros/drivers/ar5008/xp32-6.0.3.85.zip

And these worked. In fact, wireless seems every bit as crisp with NDISWrapper and these as Ubuntu 8.10 did with the native drivers... if not *better*. That just seems wrong at so many levels. But it is true as far as feelings can measure things. How long it takes to find the WAP and sync up seems to be 1/3 of the time that it used to be under Ubuntu 8.10.

The other malfunction of Mint, and Ubuntu had this as well, is that when I suspend the unit (and it suspends quickly and without drama) and then return to service, I have no sound. The new-fangled PulseAudio sound server does not appear to like suspend / resume operations.

To test out the speed and efficiency of the AAO unit running Mint, I went over to MSNBC and started to watch an episode of Rachel Maddow's show (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908). It herked and jerked something fierce. Sound was smooth though. I had done the same exact thing with the same exact computer under MS Win: I knew the AAO with is hyperthreaded 1.6 Ghz processor and 1.5 GB of RAM had the resources do this. I suspected that Mint had a weird default for the Flash player, or that at the very least this was not Flash 10. Adobe had recently release Adobe 10 for Linux, bringing it to Flash player parity with the rest of the computing platform world. I know it is not Open Source, but I still have hope that one day Adobe will see the light here. Or that one of the Open Source Flash players will catch up enough to play Rachel without digital jitter.

Looking in Synaptic, the flash player installed was called "Flashplayer-nonfree" and was labeled as being "10.0.12.36ubuntu1". Right next to that was one labeled "Adobe-Flashplugin", and it was at version "10.0.12.36-1intrepid2". I flipped them, and sure enough, Rachel was now playing smoothly. That was the main thing. I love my Linux and all, but don't be messing with the "Rachel Maddow" show. I won't go back to MS Windows or anything, but I would start using my Mac for everything Rachel if need be.

The irony that Rachel is on MSNBC is not lost on me either. Rachel, like our new, actual, real president (to be) is a Mac user. And I watch her from Linux... It is a multi-computer-cultural world these days.

Next I fired up an .mp4 rip of a DVD, to see how that would work, and here there were no problems. In fact, the AAO makes a fine little digital show viewer. It's fabulous LED backlit LCD screen is just perfect for watching a programme late at night while the SO snores on.

OpenOffice.org stays at 2.41 in Mint. I had hoped that Mint 6, being released just enough after Ubuntu 8.10 that OOo 3.0 was out would pick up the new OpenOffice, but Clem and company decided to stay with 2.4.1. it may not be that big a deal though. The main reason I wanted OOo was to be able to read MS Office 97 documents, and it turns out Ubuntu and therefore Mint have reached forward with a mod to their copy of OpenOffice 2.4 and grabbed 3.0's ability to read and write to MS's new format. I tested that at the office the other day with a Mint 6 / OOo 2.4.1 install I have there, and it worked great. I am not a fan of the MS for4mat, but I realist enough to know that interoperability is going to be required for a while yet.

I installed OOo 3.0 on a different, Ubuntu 8.10 based computer at the office, and am sort of sorry I did. For now, 2.4.1 is more stable, at least on Ubuntu and probably Mint.

Wrap up: Mint 6 stays on the AAO even in RC1 form. I have the wireless problem worked around for now, but will keep trying to get the real drivers going every time a new kernel point release comes downstream in MintUpdate. In fact, I will reach ahead and install all kernel related stuff ahead of when MintUpdate classifies then as '3's. I really want native Atheros drivers. I also hope the sound / suspend problem gets fixed by a kernel update.

Mint 5.0 at Home

I recently posted over at TalkBMC about the latest revision of Mint Linux, 5.0 Beta. As usual, when I post things to TalkBMC about Linux I am focused on Enterprise desktop or Enterprise server applications. I said there, in essence that it was hard to believe that this even was a Beta, since it was so stable. At the time I had used it about 24 hours, but as of this writing that has stretched into several days and nothing I wrote there has really changed. Still fast. Still solid. Still beautiful.

Saturday night we decided to stay in. I have been on the road in Boston and Austin for the last two weeks and sitting at home seemed a special treat. It also was a chance to do something I had not been able to for a while: Play with Linux at home. I have had my Apple Macbook with me as my primary computer for weeks now, other than the time I had been able to squeeze in on Mint on my office Dell D620.

I looked over the candidate computers at the house, looking for new place to test out Mint at home. My Acer 5610, of which I have written quite a bit here, is dead now. It stopped having a working trackpad, I took it apart, decided it was not going to be worth messing with, and piled it all in a bag for now. What I do not need is another desktop computer, and a laptop with a broken trackpad is a desktop as far as I can see.

The XO-1 will be getting a new, Fedora based Linux install on it shortly, whenever a small group of XO-1 owners near here next get together. Anne Gentle has the latest and greatest and is ready to get us all in sync. Besides, I am pretty sure the XO-1 would take some serious tweaking to get Ubuntu / Mint going on, and none of what Mint brings to the party is really what the XO-1 is about. Its not about MS WIndows either, but that is another story...

My IBM X30 was running Ubuntu 8.04, and my Dell C400 had Fedora 7. Fedora 9 just released, but I'll not be looking at it for use as a home version of Linux, due to the fact the Redhat has decided that Linux desktops are probably better left to Ubuntu. If you have no idea what I am talking about there, it is a long story, but the ending is that RedHat has decided that consumer desktop computing is not where they want to be right now.

Fedora is not exactly equal to RedHat by any means, but their distro is much harder to get going on home hardware like laptops due to not including any closed source anything, and so many of the wireless cards in laptops still require closed source drivers / firmware.

I needed a laptop for Mint, Fedora 7's old home base was elected. But this led to another problem. The Dell C400 I have I built out of parts, and I never have had a CD for it. It is too old to be able to boot off its USB 1.0 ports with my USB CD drive attached: The BIOS just does not support it. This required pressing into service my IBM X30, and doing something you just can not do with MS Windows.

I took the 80 GB Samsung PATA harddrive out of the C400, and installed it into the IBM X30. I then booted the Mint 5.0 LiveCD, and watched Mint come to life.

The IBM gets its wireless from a D-link DWL-G630 PCMCIA card, since IBM only allows their own 802.11 cards into the mini-PCI slot (#&^$^$*). ALL these stupid 802.11G cards I have laying around here from old laptops and I can't use any of then in the IBM without having to either hack the cards internal ID, or the IBM modified BIOS. And for what? the cards are perfectly good cards. grumble grumble. I digress.

Here is where something weird happened. The wireless card was dead while the LiveCD was running. I have never seen that before. It works under Ubuntu 8.04, and Mint 5 is based off that. What in the world is up there? Maybe this really is a beta....

Whatever: I don't need it to work here. The IBM is just the hard drive host mother. Clicking the install, I go through the standard seven dialog panels, and as usual, answer panel 4 with the pull down rather than the time zone map, which I find useless. I manually set up the disks as well, since I want '/' and '/home' in different partitions.

It takes about twenty minutes for the CD to load up the code to the hard drive, and prompt me to say that it is ready for a reboot. This was about twice what it took on the Dell D620 at the office, and it is purely a sign of how much I/O wait there is in an older CD unit, such as what I have in the IBM. 24x CD rather than 4X DVD. Makes a huge difference.

Now, instead of a reboot, I turned off the X30, and I pulled out the Samsung hard drive, replacing the Hitachi 40GB unit with Ubuntu installed on it, and place the host mother aside. The Samsung goes back into the Dell C400, and boots.

Here is the trick no MS Windows computer can do without all sorts of special stuff, like running Sysprep to get it back to a blank state. Linux does not care that the IBM and the Dell are different computers, with different chipsets, and different wireless cards. The Dell TruMobile 1150 MiniPCI card is correctly configured and finds the WAP in the house without issue.

Even though the '/home' I am using came from Fedora 7 and this is now Mint 5.0 Beta, the desktop is just like it used to look. It migrated to Ubuntu with only a minor issue. I had the gnome hardware sensors applet installed in Fedora, and Ubuntu did not put it in by default. No problem. Synaptic can re-install that.

First I fired up MintUpdate and had it bring down 45 updates. This took less than 3 minutes. Then it found another small set it wanted: Maybe 15 or 20 more: I didn't look. This went in taking less than a minute. I set MintUpdates preferences to show me unsafe updates, but not to automatically select them. A few more updates show up, but nothing that looks like anything I need bad enough right now: an Xorg update to the Intel video driver being the main one of interest.

Exiting Mintupdate, I fired up Synaptic from 'System/Administration' and loaded up the things I usually do. GkrellM, HFSPlus, Avahi, Macutils, hardware sensors and hddtemp: Stuff that tells me how the computer is doing, or lets me work with data exchange via HFS formatted USB disks. Not having MS Windows to deal with, all my data exchange is done on HFS right now. When the Mac and Linux support ZFS, I'll go there next. I know that HFS is not the worlds best File System. It is better than VFAT though.

Nothing of a kernel nature came down, so no reboot required. I exited my userid to restart X and then started to play around with the fully configured Mint 5.0 Beta.

My first point of curiosity had to do with video compositing. MS Windows Vista is a total pig here, needing all sorts of special video hardware to work. My Ubuntu and Mint experience had been that Linux with Compiz requires substantially less hardware: the D620 laptop at the office ran composited video extremely quickly with an Intel video chipset not known for its speed. The C400 is much older, and much much slower. It has the Intel 82830M Graphics controller, a 1.2 Ghz processor rather than two 2.0 Ghz processors, and 1Gb RAM rather than the d620'S 2gb. Its harddrive is PATA rather than SATA, and the C400 is a laptop optimized for power savings and portability, not speed.

I turned on Compiz (System / Preferences / Appearance / Visual Effects), and set it to the custom settings that were pre-existing on the computer: I assume they came with Mint. The computer is slightly slower on screen paints, but not so slow as to be unusable. Not even close. I could use 'System / Preferences / Advanced Desktop Effects Settings' (installed by default now! I used to have to go get that off the CD!) to tweak out a few more effects and go even faster if I wanted. For now my major curiosity has been satisfied: Even on old, minimal hardware, the new video compositing engine of Linux, Compiz, runs rings around MS Windows. I could not even install Vista on this C400 if I wanted to.

Firefox RC1 shipped today, so I imagine it will hit the Mint repositories pretty quickly. Clement Lefebvre, Mint 5.0 guiding light, wrote in his blog the he was keeping on eye of FireFox RC1, and had hoped it would be in the Beta. I had hoped it would too: FireFox 3.0 is a huge improvement over 2.x when it comes to things like memory footprint, memory leakage, etc. Very important on a smallish system like this C400.

One important test of the laptop is how well it web surfs, and so I went to watch Keith Olbermann's special comment a few dozen more times:



I turned on and off Compiz, and tweaked the settings, but the little laptop just can't quite hit the full framerate of the MSNBC video player. Still, it was pretty impressive that no matter whether Compiz was on or off, or at minimal effects or the slightly more I tend to use, the frame rate stayed the same. Compiz was not in the way of the video framerate. The minimal hardware overall was.

When Mint 5.0 GA's, I think I'll be making a trip back to Austin to do an ungrade on my brothers computer. He has not called me even once about Mint 4.0, so it is not giving him any problems. But 5.0 is even better, although I had beeter be sure Google Earth works first: That is his "Killer App"

Update: Suspend / Resume: I forgot to mention here that I had tested the Suspend and Resume functionality. My benchmark for Suspend / Resume is the Apple MacBook Pro.

The default for "Cover Closed' at 'System / Preferences / Power Management" is to blank the screen. I changed that to "suspend" on both the D620 and the C400. Both suspend in about 5 or 6 seconds and the D620 takes about that to resume. The C400 take a little longer, maybe 8-10 seconds. Not as fast as the Apple, but still amazingly good, and a huge improvement over what came before it.

have also tested the hibernate function on Ubuntu 8.04 and the IBM X30. That works as well, but takes more like 30 or so seconds, since it is writing its state to the disk and powering completely down. Power up looks like a normal boot except that at one point it freezes for a bit while it realizes that there is hibernation data, restores than, and then suddenly you are back to where you were. Hibernation appears to have no advantages in terms of boot time over a complete normal power up, other than it saves where you were, which can be handy from time to time.