Hello Petra, nice to meet you

Yes­ter­day night I was wai­ting for my new-to-be com­pa­ni­on to arri­ve, but the traf­fic was terri­bly slow, no won­der I fell asle­ep befo­re she finally arri­ved. This very mor­ning I took a deep bre­ath and had a look at her. Wow, she’s young, tall, slim, very attracti­ve with low demands and lots of hot things to offer. Her name’s Petra.

She will live in my 6‑year-old Leno­vo Think Pad T61 dual core, 4 GB RAM, sha­ring her new home with four four other tenants. Right now, she lives in the last apart­ment in the row, but if she’s good enou­gh she may move for­ward, who knows…

My eve­ry­day work sys­tem was ori­gi­nally LMDE, but it tur­ned into Debi­an 7.2 over the time, as I nee­ded some new functi­ons and newer ver­si­ons of lib­ra­ries. On both my Linux Mint sys­tems Mate is the default desktop envi­ron­ment (DE). I installed Crun­chbang a few weeks befo­re, ori­gi­nally to test if it will suit my 13-year-old dau­gh­ter on her net­book. She liked it being very fast on her fain­ted machi­ne and I kept it for tes­ting pur­po­ses and I have to say I like it a lot, thus using it more and more on dai­ly basis. The Win­dows sys­tem here is #7 used very occasionally.

I have been a Linux Mint (LM) user from ver­si­on 9, LM was my cho­ice after Ubun­tu got its Uni­ty desktop, which I never liked com­pa­red to my belo­ved Gno­me 2. At first I used LM with Cin­na­mon but I swit­ched to Mate in LM13 I think, as my desktop I used at that time (an Athlon XP with 2 GB of RAM) fell very slu­g­gish with Cin­na­mon. Mate has been a favou­ri­te of mine sin­ce then even if Cin­na­mon has alwa­ys been a second cho­ice for me. When Cin­na­mon 2 was out I was eager to try it out to see if the hard­ware demands will be lower having got rid of Gno­me 3 dependencies.

Installati­on of Pet­ra was a pla­in sai­ling. All hard­ware was pro­per­ly detec­ted whi­le my T61 was sit­ting in her doc­king stati­on being con­nec­ted to a 19″ HP L1950 LCD via a DVi cable. The boot from a USB stick was very fast, installati­on itself took about 15 minu­tes. For the pur­po­se of this pre­view a cle­an default install of will be descri­bed (linuxmint-16-cinnamon-dvd-64bit-rc.iso). The only app that was installed is Shut­ter to take scre­en­shots, the only chan­ge made is the panel having been moved to the top, as I’m used to it. The who­le sys­tem takes up some 3.9 GB of spa­ce which is excellent.

Fre­sh sys­tem starts in about 38 secs from Grub which is very good (the­re is no SSD in my machi­ne). After the first boot the­re are 62 upda­tes to be installed with 69 MB to be down­lo­a­ded. As this is a rele­a­se can­di­da­te it is no sur­pri­se. From the very first moment the sys­tem is per­fect­ly usa­ble — this is one of the Linux fea­tu­res I love over Win­dows sys­tems. I star­ted wri­ting this pre­view about 5 minu­tes after finishing the install. OK, let’s get started…

My nati­ve lan­gu­age is Czech, I’m a translator/interpretor and an Eng­lish tea­cher by pro­fes­si­on, no won­der I care about thing like loca­li­zati­on. The loca­li­zati­on team seems to have done a gre­at job, the­re are only two or three strings my eyes keep noti­cing and these are “Síťo­vá­ní” and “Barev­nost” whe­re I per­so­nally would pre­fer sim­ple “Síť” and “Bar­vy” respecti­ve­ly, but no big deal. Loca­li­zing soft­ware can be very tric­ky qui­te often. Gre­at job!
Edit: the main menu uses “Síť” and “Bar­vy” for the same items, so the­re is a litt­le inconsistency.

First thing that stro­ke me was swit­ching the desk­tops — the moment my mou­se cur­sor got near the scre­en edge, the desktop got swit­ched. The first time it hap­pe­ned I did­n’t under­stand what’s going on. My just laun­ched Fire­fox was gone 🙂 (I don’t use this fea­tu­re in my Mate settings, not exact­ly sure the­re is one right now). The most stran­ge thing about this fea­tu­re is, that swit­ching the wor­k­pla­ce with the mou­se is silent with no indi­cati­on on the scre­en, but if you switch using the key­bo­ard, you hear a sound and the desk­to­p’s name pops up! On the other hand, win­dow sna­pping and tiling, win­dows manage­ment as a who­le is gre­at — that’s some­thing I miss very much in Mate and OpenBox.

The USB wri­ter seems to be new in LM. Just try­ing to wri­te a Crun­chbang iso to see if my dau­gh­ter’s net­book will be able to boot from it, as it refused to boot from a USB stick image cre­a­ted with unet­bo­o­tin (my T61 had no pro­blems boo­ting from it).

Soft­ware cho­ice is stan­dard for LM, with Lib­re Offi­ce in Ver­si­on: 4.1.2.3, Java 7.

For transla­ting and loca­li­zati­on jobs, Ome­gaT is the cru­cial soft­ware for me. It’s a Java appli­cati­on which can be down­lo­a­ded with it’s own Java envi­ron­ment. Have to say Ome­gaT looks just ama­zing in Pet­ra, the inter­fa­ce is polished and you would­n’t guess it’s a Java app. It’s a litt­le bit slowish thou­gh, ente­ring text just lea­ves the cur­sor behind, it takes a second or two for the input to appear. It’s the same on my main sys­tem with Mate, but the inter­fa­ce is not so nice and cle­an. But on the LMDE installati­on, it looks just as good as on the main sys­tem, but it’s swift and fast. Run­ning my work envi­ron­ment (Ome­gaT, web brow­ser with 5 tabs open, ter­mi­nal and some music pla­y­ing in the bac­kground lea­ves me with more than 50 % of free RAM. That’s great.

Issues

OK, first issue — waking up from hiber­nati­on did­n’t finish — I hiber­na­ted the com­pu­ter whi­le it was in doc­king stati­on, did­n’t wake up when taken off it.

error when updating:
Zpra­co­vá­ní spouš­tě­čů pro balík initramfs-tools …
upda­te-ini­t­ramfs: Gene­ra­ting /boot/initrd.img‑3.11.0–12-generic
War­ning: No sup­port for loca­le: cs_CZ.utf

Software manager

It seems fas­ter, the loa­ding time is shor­ter, also would say installati­on is “swif­ter”, Sky­pe is in the repo­si­to­ry. But the appli­cati­ons grid sta­ys the same no mat­ter how wide the win­dow is.

Gallery of screenshots