Linux Mint 12, code name ‘Lisa’, was released back in November. I put off trying it because of Gnome 3 that is included in the build. I haven’t been too pleased with the progression of Gnome in the past couple of updates so that is why I scorn the release of Mint 12. I did, however, give Mint 12 a chance in a virtual machine and that is as far as I gave it at that time.
Well the introduction of the Cinnamon interface that was announced back in January peaked my interest and opened the door to me giving Mint 12 another chance. So, at the beginning of the week I cloned my Vostro V130 with Clonezilla that had a dual build of Windows 7 and Mint 11 and decided to try the Mint 12 release on it. I loaded it side by side again with Windows 7, completed the updates as soon as it finished installing and then immediately installed Cinnamon. And, I love it. I love the Cinnamon interface. It is a vast improvement over Gnome 3.
I haven’t had too much time within Mint 12 itself as I am still in the process of troubleshooting a wireless card issue. It works but not well. My assumption is that the driver for my integrated wireless card that comes with Mint 12 is either corrupt or not a good driver. I have extremely slow performance using it. The integrated wired card works fine, no issues there so trying to fix this issue is top priority since I use wireless most of the time. Everything else on the laptop in Mint 12, so far, seems to work just fine.
I’ll post more later if and when I find a solution for the wireless issue.
I may give it a try myself on my desktop. Cinnamon intrigues me so that’s going to get added too. I’ve been wanting to re-install Linux on the desktop again as a primary OS due to some other things going on now.
Seeing as I presently have Win7 Pro on the desktop and updating drivers is fast becoming a royal pita due to the Lenovo 3000 H Series originally having Vista, going with LM 12/Cinnamon seems to be a much better alternative than building a new box or buying one.
I’m still using Mint 10 on my desktop. I’ve got it so customized (alternate login screen, etc.) I fear change.
I know how you feel. I need to come up with a good solution for the HP printer before going ahead. My wife uses it from her laptop so maybe a wireless printer solution will do the trick.
Yeah we use a wireless HP all-in-one that works just fine under Mint.
I’ll see what I can find that will work with ours. She does a lot of her school work from home and uses the printer more than I do. :/
I too set up Linux Mint 12 today on a Dell Vostro 260 (Core i3-2120, 3GB, 1TB WD Caviar Black). I’m just getting back into linux after being away for a few years by necessity. The interface is nice and snappy, but I also noticed extremely poor network performance, despite it working fine when I reboot into win7 on the same machine. I was working off of the wired connection, and could only get about 2.5mbp download, 2.9 mbp upload (In windows, It’s closer to 22 mbp down, 2.9mbp up). Even connections to my LAN machines were intermittent at best, I was constantly dropping connections (RDP, SMB browsing). Since you also experienced something similar, perhaps it is not isolated to just my hardware.
Yeah. I was able to fix my networking issue. See the post after this.