Mint 17

Wow, I guess it's a long time since I blogged.

I'm installing Mint 17 Mate on my laptop this weekend.

Last year I went through a lot of pain installing Linux on this hardware due to Linux support for UEFI still being in its infancy. I'm happy to say jumping through all those hoops is a thing of the past with Mint 17.  This was pretty much a routine install.

For the first time, I didn't need to do anything special with the window manager.  Usually I have to switch to metacity or mutter, but in this case marco just works.

I could not get either mintbackup or the dpkg/dselect technique to work this time, possibly due to all the additional repos, such as xorg-edgers, I had installed to get things working previously.  Or possibly I should say, after one 8 hour attempt to restore everything led to an unstable system, I was out of time to experiment with this.  I figure since this is a 5 year LTS release I'll have plenty of time to install all the packages I want, and I do still have the list of the ones I installed before to install manually as needed.

The xorg-edgers packages I formerly needed to get Bumblebee to work are now part of the standard repos.  See Nvidia Optimus on Linux Mint 17 - GT650M ASUS N56, for example.  This is now an easy and routine thing.

Suspend and hibernate work out of the box, yay.