(cut-n-pasted from my main blog - 15th February 2009)

Last night I became intrigued by a recent Linux Format cover disk. It had a copy of Linux Mint 6 on it. The last time I tried Linux Mint I thought it was rather good, and I think that version 6 is even better. I tried it as a live CD on my Acer Travelmate 290 laptop first, and it worked well enough that I fitted an old 20 GB hard drive in the laptop and did a permanent install. Unlike many Linux distributions it doesn't pussyfoot around and makes all those "forbidden" multimedia libraries easily available. I am actually using Linux Mint on my laptop to write these very words.

 One thing Linux Mint 6 doesn't have is the XMMS audio player, however I have discovered that it does have Audacious. I had never heard of Audacious before, but it came up in the package lists when looking for music players and I thought I would give it a go. It's good ! It does exactly what XMMS (or Winamp 2.xx) should do - it plays music files with a simple, and neat, user interface. The default interface is not to my taste, but it is skinnable. I  couldn't find any explicit mention of it in the help files (though I didn't look that deeply), but it is happy using classic Winamp skins. The classic skin can be downloaded from Winamps website, and installed in the Audacious skins directory. It is possible that the downloaded zip file may need to be renamed to a .wsz file, but the version I had stored on my server already had the correct file extension. I think I am most happy with Audacious !

(...and the next day - 16th February 2009)

 I spent more time experimenting/playing with Linux Mint 6 on my big laptop yesterday. I still think it is rather good, although I did forget to mention one bad thing about it when I wrote about it yesterday. After doing the permanent installation on a small 20 GB hard disk (with a root partition of 4 GB) I started to do all the updates. The update process failed saying it had run out of disk room. Fortunately, not being Windows, this did not have any impact on the operating system - crashes, blue screen of death, etc. The first thing I did to make some space was to uninstall Open Office. That made a fair bit of space, but then I found that I had installed help files, dictionaries, and all sorts of stuff to use with just about any language used by more than 10 people anywhere in the world. By removing just about anything that was not to do with UK English (apart from a few esoteric fonts that are sometimes needed for web browsing), and all of Open Office, I managed to recover over 1.5 GB of hard disk space. That was plenty to install all the updates, and to install many other useful programmes too. That included Abiword as a lightweight alternative to Open Office for word processing.

 One curious feature of Linux Mint 6 is that I am not sure what desktop I am using. Superficially it is like KDE (also a bit like windows), but I believe that it is actually a heavily customised hybrid Gnome desktop, and yet some of it is very reminiscent of Xfce. As a curious hybrid it works well apart from one small niggle. As yet I have found no way to have different wallpaper on each of the four desktops. It is not a major problem. In fact it is not any problem at all except..........well, different pictures would be sort of nice.