I love Ubuntu. It's been my choice for a desktop Linux for three years.
But I just veered down a side road. it's still Ubuntu under the hood, but the distro is actually Linux Mint.
Mint is basically Ubuntu with all proprietary codecs thrown in. It also comes with its own menu manager. It's released a month or so after Ubuntu.
I recently upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10, and something went screwy. I was getting X crashes, anywhere from one a week to several a day. I've successfully upgraded in the past, but this was a bad one. So I was going to have to rebuild.
I decided to give Mint a shot. I'd heard good things about it. I wasn't disappointed.
My home partition is separately partitioned, so i kept it that way, declining to format. Upon first reboot, I got a grub 15 error. It was solved by following the instructions here.
Problem #2: my home directory was not the one I wanted. Problem solved by adding this line to fstab:
/dev/sda2 /home ext3 relatime 0 2
Of course, my /home partition was /dev/sda2/home. Put your own values in here.
After that, it was a matter on installing my favorite Ubunbtu apps that were not included in Mint, including Evolution, Amarok (I know, Kubuntu, but I always add it!), gFTP, DeVede, Virtualbox, etc.
Once I rebooted, I was delighted to see all of my apps exactly as I remembered them. I was particularly glad to see crossover Pro in place, with Dreamweaver ready to roll. This shouldn't have been too surprising, since Crossover installs itself and any Windows apps in home.
Interestingly, my Nvidia driver had to be installed from the manufacturer, unlike Ubuntu. But it has proven to be rock-solid.
So here's to Mint, a flavor of Linux I find very refreshing, indeed. Not a single X crash since my install!
