Monster Desktop Renewal with Linux Mint 11

I’ve been having a spot of trouble with my Mint 9 desktop machine recently, where something would lock up Gnome/X periodically. Somehow it seemed related to running OpenOffice and Firefox at the same time with something “video” happening. (Now, to be honest, I’d done my Mint 9 installation in a “messy” way — I was too lazy to reconfigure stuff, so I just reused my home directory leaving all the “dot” (configuration) files in place — so I probably caused the problem myself.)

After having it happen to me several times in one day, I decided this was the perfect excuse to upgrade my 5+ year old hardware to more recent stuff. My pals at NewEgg were great in setting me up with some new gear I could swap into my existing box:

• AMD Phenom II x4 925: 4-core processor
• Asus M4A78LT-M Motherboard
• 8 GB G. SKILL Ripjaws DDR3-1600 Memory

I was able to re-use all my other existing stuff, so I was able to jump up to a monster but energy efficient system for less than Netbook dollars.

I ended up choosing Linux Mint 11 (the release candidate version) as my OS to install. The great thing about Mint is their Mint Backup tool. Not only will it allow you to do simple home directory backups, but it provides an easy mechanism to move to a new installation and preserve your installed software packages selection. Even across architectures (which is what I was doing, moving from a 32-bit install to 64-bit).

The installation proceeded in a pretty much painless way, and in a short while I ended up with a system that can do pretty much anything I need with all my old files and applications in place. All my old HW worked without issue. Mint 11 includes Firefox 4 and the internet screams on this thing. Hulu/Flash worked out of the box. Only problem was needing to install the Gnome Alsamixer to mute the sound card capture until the TV tuner was started.

I’ll be continuing to make a few tweaks and bring back some of the old dot files for my prior customizations, but it looks like the sailing is going to be smooth. Especially notable given that this is not a final release. Thanks Mint Team!

Update 6/15/11: Mint 11 is now released, and all the packages updated automatically for me from the RC versions. Everything is still working smoothly but for one issue: my new Cyber Power CP1500 AVR UPS is apparently not playing well with the system.

Periodically I get a notification that the UPS battery is low and the system automatically hibernates. The battery is not low, and the UPS knows it based upon what shows on its built-in display. I did not install Cyber Power’s linux software previously because it appeared that everything was already working out of the box (there was an added tab under the GNOME Power Settings for what actions to take while on UPS power). I’ve now installed their SW to see if it makes any difference. My quick work-around was to unplug the USB connection so the system can’t get a power low signal and therefore doesn’t hibernate, but I’d rather use the automatic shutdown capability properly. So far the shutdowns seem to have stopped so the SW seems to be working, will see if it does so from here forward. Their documentation is clearly by a non-native English speaker so it is a bit tricky to understand, FYI.