[Blackpool] This weeks meeting 17th April 2010

[Tony Hughes]

Hi All I've just posted this to the Blog

I installed the RC onto my test bed laptop yesterday. The new install 
procedure looks good, on first boot from the DC you get a choice to run 
in live mode or go strait to install but its a nice new GUI from the get 
go. Install options are the same as 9.10. Once you have chosen your 
region, keyboard and decided on if you want to install on the whole disc 
or not you get prompted to choose a user name and password and if you 
want to boot to desktop without needing password or not. You also have 
the choice to encrypt your home directory which is good if its a 
portable PC. The actual install took about 25 minutes which wasn't to 
bad. Given that this was the RC and had only been out a couple of days 
there was a lot of updates to the software which took another 20-30 
minutes to install once the base system was in place.

It seems slick and quite fast but not yet ready for work use as it will 
not recognise my 3G dongle, this seems to be a known bug going back to 
9.10 which seems to have still not been resolved, not good for the new 
LTS release and as it's not an issue in Mint 8 (based on 9.10) why is it 
still an issue here? Boot time is acceptable for the hard ware and 
everything else seems to work fine, all the PC hardware was recognised 
out of the box, but as I put it on a Dell I1300, and considering all the 
work Ubuntu and Dell have done together I would expect nothing else. It 
also recognised my WiFi? dongle without any problems. It downloaded the 
codecs for MP3, Flash and DVD as needed and all are working. It also 
shuts down very quickly. One small thing is that the Max, min and close 
buttons on windows are now on the upper left hand side (Mac like) it can 
be a bit confusing at first and I think I would want to change this back 
to what I'm used to.

If it was not for the 3G issue I would say it was ready for day to day 
use on a second PC, but I wouldn't chance it as my day to day works PC 
until I was sure there were no more bugs lurking in the background. It 
will also be interesting to see how others fare on different hardware 
and different peripherals. I think I will wait for Mint 9 to come out 
and let them sort out the bugs before I install it to my working PC.

Tony