Linux Mint Cassandra
I bought a new 160GB hard drive from Wal-Mart with a gift card I received for my birthday (Thanks, Dad!), and I decided to install Mint on it. For those that may not have heard of this particular Linux distribution, it is built on top of Ubuntu. The benefit is that it also includes all of the codecs that you would need to hunt for around the web to get your audio/video/movies to play correctly.
I was expecting to have to do some weird tricks with my hardware setup since I still wanted to be able to boot into Windows. I have two 80 GB Serial ATA hard drives that are hooked into a Adaptec RAID card in a mirrored configuration. I wanted to keep this setup, and this necessitated a separated HD for Linux -- I didn't want to do partitioning, and I've had bad luck with separate partitions getting corrupted anyway.
Since the Windows hard drives boot off the Serial ATA card and my new Linux HD was a standard EIDE, I was happy to find that the Mint boot loader actually figured out my weird setup. The loader simply intercepts the boot process and offers me a menu on which operating system to choose when I start up. I was a little wary of picking the Windows option the first time, but it worked just fine.
Mint itself is terrific. The only hitch I had was that my Sound Blaster Audigy wouldn't work without disabling the onboard audio in the BIOS. No loss since I never use the onboard audio anyway. Last night I was coding in Python with PIDA, listening to my music with Amarok, and watching Rear Window (and Grace Kelly!) on DVD with Totem Movie Player.
Everything works together smoothly. I'm impressed.
I was expecting to have to do some weird tricks with my hardware setup since I still wanted to be able to boot into Windows. I have two 80 GB Serial ATA hard drives that are hooked into a Adaptec RAID card in a mirrored configuration. I wanted to keep this setup, and this necessitated a separated HD for Linux -- I didn't want to do partitioning, and I've had bad luck with separate partitions getting corrupted anyway.
Since the Windows hard drives boot off the Serial ATA card and my new Linux HD was a standard EIDE, I was happy to find that the Mint boot loader actually figured out my weird setup. The loader simply intercepts the boot process and offers me a menu on which operating system to choose when I start up. I was a little wary of picking the Windows option the first time, but it worked just fine.
Mint itself is terrific. The only hitch I had was that my Sound Blaster Audigy wouldn't work without disabling the onboard audio in the BIOS. No loss since I never use the onboard audio anyway. Last night I was coding in Python with PIDA, listening to my music with Amarok, and watching Rear Window (and Grace Kelly!) on DVD with Totem Movie Player.
Everything works together smoothly. I'm impressed.
posted by Brandon Corfman at
11:40 AM
5 Comments:
Oops... just in time for Gutsy to be released today... it'll of course be awhile before Mint pushes another version. But even at work, where I don't need all the Minty codec goodness... I still have managed to round up the azule (blue) theme that Mint used to ship with.
By
ScW, At
3:13 PM
Speaking of Rear Window have you seen Disturbia? Thought I was not going to like it... but definitely enjoyed it. I thought it was nicely adapted to modern times.
By
ScW, At
3:16 PM
No, I keep meaning to see Disturbia. I have to put it on the Netflix queue.
By
Brandon Corfman, At
8:36 AM
Oh how I wish I'd came across this post before attempting to install Mint on a SATA configuration. Grub has gone belly up, and i cant get into Windoze anymore. I'll have to check my onboard audio to see if that fixes the SB Audigy problem. I have the same card. At least I'll have music to listen to whilst trying to figure it out!
By
Paul, At
7:47 AM
@Paul, I know some people can get partitioning for different OSes to work, but for me it's always been a ticking time bomb. Eventually the partition table (or Grub as you noted) gets corrupt in some way, and one or more OS gets hosed.
Best of luck in your restore efforts.
By
Brandon Corfman, At
10:02 AM
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