Linux Mint 10

I finally got around to backing up my Win7 OS on my laptop.  I didn't want to fiddle with another OS on it until I had a good backup.  (Win7 on that laptop runs very well, especially the multimedia stuff.)  Well, the first playing I did was to install Linux Mint 10.  Beautiful, just beautiful.  It installed easily, side by side with Win7, with a wired hookup.  After downloading a hefty amount of updates, I rebooted without the cable to the router.  After that, hooking it up to my wireless network was a breeze.  There is none of the common problems I've seen in the past, no problems with hibernating, sound, wireless, or battery usage.

Looks like a good one to install for someone that wants their computer to just work without much interaction on their part.  Flash, and other goodies, were installed by default.

Puppy has a lot lower overhead, but I'm guessing more to have to configure as well.  I just prefer the Gnome interface.

Yep, they are an excitable bunch. 

So far...impressive. I wound up installing Mint 10 on the old Dell laptop. Partly because I have not made a recent backup of my old Toshiba laptop...yet.  And partly because I already had a Linux installed on the Dell (PCLinuxOS) and figured I couldn't do any damage. LOL

It's too late to play with it and too late to set up wireless. I'll see how it goes on the Dell before deciding about the old Toshiba. That's the one I've been using since our college student has my good one...but it's got a "pause" in it. Two or three seconds (sometimes more) after clicking on just about anything...before it decides to respond. (It probably needs a fresh XP install...but oh how I hate that anymore.)

Yeah. It would be nice if the HD was bigger on the old Toshiba to dual boot. It's a 60GB drive which is already has the XP and a data partition. 

Originally posted by Randy Cool!  Just left click on the network icon on the tool bar.

Wow. Slick!! Puts setting up Ubuntu wireless to shame!

Did you get he error from just booting off the CD or were you trying an install?

Oddly enough...XP is perkier than it was before the Mint attempt and XP image restore.  The only thing I did was run SpinRite, which reported one bad sector, but apparently fixed it.

I wouldn't mind having a new (larger) hard drive.  The old Toshiba doesn't have a 60GB as I think I mentioned earlier...just a 40.  But..boy..hate to put any $$ in it. But...these days...it don't take much to fill up 40 GB (especially if trying (wanting) to dual-boot).

Tried it again tonight.  Just for the heck of it. Even wiped the drive ahead of time with Killdisk.

Same writing to the hard disk error message.  All things considered...who knows. LOL

Yep, I hang onto IFW and IFD just in case.  Funny you mention it, I just got an email yesterday telling of an update for both.

Oh yes, I forgot to comment on your question above.  Generally the updates on a Linux OS does know what it's doing.  I have not had any breakage that I've noticed on my Ubuntu 10.04 LTS setup for quite some time, and LinuxMint 10, so far, has not shown any issues.

If you stick with apps from the sources the distro maintains you are pretty safe.