Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
I have two root partitions on sda so that I can test a new version while maintaining an old one. Of course, I have the /home partition separate, and have swap and /tmp partitions on sdb.
With the expiration of Lucid Lynx, I needed to upgrade, but I remain very unhappy with Unity, so I decided to try Linux Mint Maya. Maya is an LTS version based on Precise, and has an expiration date of April 2017. I chose the Cinnamon version, which runs Gnome 3.
Prior to the installation, I ran:
dpkg –get-selections > installed-software
on my Lucid partition to make it easier to reinstall the packages I have been using.
The installation ran flawlessly – something we have come to expect from Linux and Debian- based distributions in particular. Among other things, I noted that my wireless is working again, which has been up and down during my time with Lucid. That alone makes me wish I had installed Mint a year ago.
Following the installation, I ran software update, installed the restricted video driver, and confirmed that my home directory was still intact. Again, no problems.
I tried:
dpkg –set-selections < installed-software.txt dselect
as well as:
sudo dpkg –clear-selections sudo dpkg –set-selections < installed-software.txt sudo aptitude install
trying to reload the packages I previously installed. After about 10 minutes of thinking, both of these failed. They offered me some kind of manual method of resolving dependencies, but that seemed like more trouble, especially since I didn't know what all the dependencies were. I tried trimming the list of all “lib*” and packages which might have been loaded because something depended on them, and still had no luck.
Finally, I opened the list in one window and Synaptic in another, and manually set everything I wanted. It would be really nice if there were a get-selections command that only got the top level packages, i.e. with nothing depending on them, which could then be used to reload packages when you have done a fresh install of a different version of Linux.
OPERATIONS
I like a bare desktop, and always set a black background. I was quickly able to set four workspaces. and saw them numbered 1 through 4 in my menu bar. Some of the tools I regularly use had been updated, which means they set their configuration after being launched. For those which then had two .conf files, I was quickly able to set the configuration choices I wanted.
Movies and emulators in particular ran very slowly. The new graphical system monitoring tool is cute, but requires a huge percentage of CPU horsepower. Instead, I used top to demonstrate what was taking all the time. Cinnamon itself is the culprit, requiring about 5% of one CPU when quiescent, and an entire CPU when something which does screen writes is active. I would hope that the Cinnamon developers put some thought into optimizing it. My next laptop will probably be a 4-core, but that doesn't mean that a window manager which requires an entire CPU for itself is a good thing.
I will probably look for and download Gnome 2, which would make this effectively the MATE version of Mint Maya, to see if the heavy CPU load is present there as well. I'll write and let you know how it works.