It all started a few weeks ago when I got a wonderful fathers day GIFT. As you can imagine I was rather excited. When you are a tech guy like myself there is nothing like getting hardware upgrades. So I unboxed my shiny new toy and got to work moving things around and untangling wires. I decided that rather than just replacing my old flat screen I was finally gonna go dual screen and try to increase my “productivity“.
I got everything hooked up and began to try and configure my new dual monitor setup. For the life of me I could not get it to work right in Mandriva! Basically I could get the nvidia settings manager to correctly configure my displays to span the way I wanted, but when I would go to save the config to the Xorg.conf it would give me some permissions error bullshit. I tried to do it as root. Tried logging in a root. I don’t know what the hell I was doing wrong. I love Linux but I am by no means a “guru”. I kept fighting it a few days. Having to configure it every time I logged in. Only took three or four clicks. But it just ate at me that it wasn’t right. About that time I got a good look at some of the screen shots and reviews from Mint 7 and decided to give it a try.
I downloaded the .iso from Linux Mint’s website and burned it. Did one last backup and booted to the CD and ran through the installed. Lets just say that things went off without a hitch. We have all read a million reviews with details of this and that. The main thing I want to emphasize it that this edition of Mint is VERY nice looking. Once I ran updates and loaded proprietary drivers for my video card I was able to configure dual displays and compiz fusion with ease. I have been using it a few weeks now and everything is wonderful. Tweetdeck works great. All my hardware worked out of the box. No complaints here. Great Distro. Pulled me away from Mandirva and KDE and that is a hard thing to do. Afterward Picture.
