After playing with my laptop a little more, I can boot into either Linux Mint or Vista. The default boot loader that Mint installed gave two selections for "Vista" when it found Acer's "boot partition" in addition to the main C: drive. Apparently, Acer has an extra partition containing the boot loader. I had to choose the option for the C: drive partition to boot into Vista. So, I removed the first option from the menu list. Booting into Vista might be useful sometimes. It's just slow as hell.
Linux Mint seems to work pretty well. The only problem I've seen is that the audio player will crash a lot. I haven't looked into the cause yet. Fortunately, I don't use the laptop for much multimedia, so this may not be a problem for me. The main thing is that the wireless network adapter works.
Added on 3/27/09:
I installed the XFCE4 window manager (desktop user interface) for a lightweight, fast GUI. I installed it using Linux Mint's meta-package in Synaptic package manager. XFCE is noticeably faster than Gnome and even has the Aqua (Mac style) theme available by default. Very nice. I also tested audio playback by double-clicking one of my audio files. The Totem player appeared and the song played without any problems! I think I'll be using XFCE for now.
Added on 4/3/09:
Found that the suspend feature doesn't restore correctly on my laptop. Removed the option from the logout option list. Haven't tried hibernate feature yet.
Added on 4/12/09:
Installed Mint on my desktop and it found the wireless adapter correctly!!
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Linux Mint for the Laptop
I installed Linux Mint on my Acer Extensa 4420. Seems to have found hardware successfully, including the wireless network adapter. Couldn't boot back into Vista, but maybe I won't fuss with it for now. I didn't like having to wait five minutes for Vista to boot up and getting warnings that I was running low on memory all the time. Now to install my apps.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)