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Newsletters SunGard Aquires Hosting 365
A synopsis of SunGard's acquisition of 365 Hosting Limited, a Dublin, Ireland-based cloud computing and data centre services company..
The first thing to be aware of is that with KDE added on top of the Linux Mint distribution, the size of the Live Image is about 1.1Gb. Of course that's too large to fit on a CD, so we are talking about a LiveDVD here. That shouldn't be a problem these days, but it is worth knowing in advance.
For those who are not familiar with Linux Mint already, it is based on the latest Ubuntu distribution (9.10 in this case), with a lot of extremely useful and easy-to-use "Mint-utilites" added, and a lot of other additional packages and programs which make it a lot more useful "out of the box". For FOSS purists, be aware that the standard Mint distributions include various proprietary and non-FOSS software, but now they also have a "Universal Edition" which they describe as "without including proprietary software, patented technologies or support for restricted formats". (There is not a Universal Mint KDE edition that I know of, however).
There is a good "What's New" document that gives a lot of information about the new release. So, I am now in the process of downloading the image, burning it to a DVD, and installing it on some of my notebook/netbook/nettop systems. I will post again here when I have it running on a few systems. One thing I can already say, I like the graphical installer even better than the standard Mint (Ubuntu) installer. It may be that this is the same one used by Kubuntu, I haven't installed that in quite a long time so I don't know what it looks like any more. But this is nice, clean, easy to use and easy to understand.
Enjoy!
jw 7/2/2010
Talkback
Update: Mint 8 KDE installed on my Fujitsu Lifebook S6510 without a hitch, and it works very nicely. On my HP Pavillion db2-1010ez (AMD CPU and ATI graphic controller) I had to boot the LiveDVD in "compatibility mode", as the default boot was hanging. Once I did that it installed normally, and the installed system boots and runs very well. On my HP 2133 Mini-Note (VIA C7-M CPU, Chrome graphic controller, WXGA, 1280x768 on an 8" screen) the LiveDVD boots normally, but the graphic installer window uses disproportionately large fonts, causing parts of the installation dialog to be unreadable or inaccessible. I haven't looked yet to see if that is actually due to font selection or using the wrong display driver.
Overall I am still very pleased with Mint 8 KDE on the S6510 and 1010ez. If you prefer KDE, or you are looking for a good environment to try it with, this one is definitely worth a try.
jw
I use the normal mint distribution as my favorite now. It really is "just" ubuntu plus all the extra's you want anyway. KDE is not my thing though, although when I tried it a few years ago it was really unusable for me, now it is nice and usable but it just misses some logic and simplicity to me, so I still prefer the Gnome edition. The progress of KDE seems very promising anyway.
Also very promising is http://www.eeebuntu.org
I will maybe use that one on my netbook. A lot better than Moblin ;)
@knakworst - My KDE experience seems to have been about the same as yours. When I first looked at it, a few years ago, I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Today, looking at KDE 4.x, I could work with it if I needed to, but I still have the feeling that there are huge amounts of things that I "should" be able to do, but can't - this is surely my own problem, that I am not understanding it, but I think it is also a problem with KDE not making things simple/obvious/automatic enough. Or maybe it is just that old dogs don't learn new tricks very easily. I will say, though, that I have found the early pre-releases of the new KDE Netbook Edition to be extremely interesting, and I can hardly wait for the final release of that.
As for Moblin, I find pretty much anything to be a lot better than that, up to and including a poke in the eye with a sharp stick!
jw