Well, the experiment with DreamLinux didn’t last for very long. While the install went well, I found the following issues around getting it to work with my Dell 9300 laptop:
- The wireless network drivers didn’t work off the install – i had to use ndiswrapper to load up the windows version of the wireless adapter’s drivers.
- World of Warcraft didn’t work with Wine. That was pretty much the deal breaker for me. While others may have got WoW to work successfully with DreamLinux, I unfortunately couldn’t make it work – even after trying numerous suggested solutions.
- The XFCE windows manager, while being good and lite, was just a bit too different for my liking. I am just not used to the button placing and the windows elements seem to be floating in the windows.
- In the end, i knew i had to go back to Gnome as my main environment. Back to Distrowatch and onto Linux Mint I went..
The good news is that, the install went perfectly, the wireless drivers were detected and installed, the updates all happened correctly and to top it off, World of Warcraft runs swimmingly on it :)
Running at a native resolution of 1900×1200 using the latest proprietory nvidia drivers, the performance of WoW under Wine was excellent. While the frame rate did fall a bit in the newer (more system hungry) zones, it was still quite a bit better than under Ubuntu.
I’ve now got the system running pretty much as i wanted it with the last thing left to install being the VPN connections to my work machine :)
It looks a little different then Ubuntu and provides what i would consider a slightly more superior "start" button.
Adding additional software etc was as easy as always and Mint comes with its own selection of tools to simplify the process even further.
One thing to note though is that Mint has built a custom search tool in Firefox that replaces the default search tool. This is to generate some much needed revenue and i do support this. However, the custom search doesn’t give the user the ability to search images, etc.. However, there is a link on the Mint forums to remove this custom search and replace with the more familiar Google, yahoo etc search. I would suggest leaving the custom search there though as we all need to support these people who have put in so much of their valuable time.
The forums themselves are quite busy (good sign) and the people are generally helpful.
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