This is a followup review to Part #1 which can be found here

In my quest to make Linux Mint 10 by sole operating system, I needed to bring over two contact lists into Mozilla Thunderbird, which is the default email software installed with Mint 10. I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird on my Windows 7 system and I found that I like T-bird very much. I exported both of my contact lists from Outlook 2007 and T-Bird and copied the files over as .csv format. Before importing the files, I opened both and trimmed down the majority of fields, since I just wanted the names and email addresses of my contacts. The import went well and after merging both contact lists, I had the names and email addresses I needed.

Next, I transferred my entire Documents folder over from Windows to Mint. It was 281MB of stuff. It is funny. Once I looked at the stuff you have accumulated a good cleaning was in order. It reminded me of Hoarders. We love to keep the gunk and junk that we may need someday but rarely do. The first thing I needed to do was open two .pdf documents and one document created in Microsoft Word 2007. No problems here. The .pdf documents were handled by Document Viewer, Word documents were handled by Open Office Writer [no formatting issues were noted] and .jpg pictures were handled by Eye of Gnome. There may be better software out there but these worked just fine.

What also impressed me was that Open Office Writer asked if I wanted to keep the original .docx extension or convert it over to .odt. Either way I was able to view all of my documents without issue.

When you use the built-in Update Manager software, make this change. Open the software, go to Edit, Software sources. You will see a listing for Download From. From the drop down menu select other. You will be presented with a list of servers near you with one being recommended. I chose the recommend server and it has been working great. The auto update feature works fine and thus far the updates have not caused any issues.

Another nice feature that I have not noticed before in any Linux version I have previously used . When you pop in a disk, CD, DVD, DVD DL the system provides an icon indicating what the disk is. Even if it is a -R or +R. No biggie, just a nice feature.

Last evening I had received a DVD PowerPoint Presentation and using Brasero was able to make an exact copy of the disk. I also tried a little experiment using Brasero. I took one of my own DVD Movie disks that I bought and tried to make a copy of the movie. I copied the disk as an image to the system and then burned the image to a dual-layer disk. It worked just fine. Before I go on any further, I do not condone nor recommend violating copyrighted material. I just wanted to see if it could be done using the software that came with Mint by default.

This morning I received an email for a posting over at Scots Newsletter Forum. It was a link to Dedoimedo with an article ‘And the best distro of 2010 is ….” At first I was a little disappointed since no where is the review was there any mention of Mint. But at the end of the article was this:

And the GRAND winner is …

You haven’t seen it listed above, but it would feature under the glorious title of best all-arounder. And that would have to be Linux Mint. While it did underperform in the spring, the autumn release is just splendid. It’s a perfect 10 for the tenth release.

Linux Mint Julia has the best overall combination of ingredients. The best desktop theme and menu, the best combination of programs, the best package management. It’s the most usable distribution out there, and it’s just a pleasure to run.

The article goes on to state that while Mint is based on Ubuntu, the developers have done something that I believe is worth mentioning. They have included software that makes it easy for the new Linux user to use and more importantly understand. So simple is the GUI and features included with Mint, that I was actually able to put software icons and what is called the panel aka in Windows taskbar. This gives my desktop the clean look I like with no icons visible.

There was also this statement:

Everything works out of the box, every little detail is carefully placed and designed, there’s practically nothing bad you can think of.

This is the real beauty of Mint. It works.

I haven’t used Microsoft Windows 7 for well over a week and I am not missing it at all. What I am enjoying is a fast system that is not bogged down by anti-virus software and other junk. Is there a difference in RAM usage? Yes there is. I would normally use about 1.5G to 1.8G of RAM running Windows while using Firefox and Thunderbird. That has dropped to about 500MB.

Comments welcome

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