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Mint - Felicia version 8.10 RC1

Introduction

As many of you will know, recently Ubuntu released its latest operating system and at the time of writting this review the latest Ubuntu offering was that of Intrepid Ibex version "8.10" Mint latest offering towards the Ubuntu flavours is known as "Felicia" so thought it useful to take a look at the Mint Gnome version or version "8.10". You should note this review only covers the RC1 version of this software this effectively is the pre-release version of there OS and not the final release

Mint Distro

Introduction 32Bit

Mint is a distro - German of course - that has a wonderful appeal about it, although not a Ferrari it certainly looks as good as one, perhaps a better analogy would be a BMW, a masterpiece of German engineering thats Mint not the car. Most Linux distro's are derivatives and Mint is no exception it is Debian based ie "Ubuntu", one of Ubuntu criticisms is that whilst it works very well, is stable and reliable it just does not have great looks. Mint does have looks and really good one at that, it has a certain wow factor which appeals to many, it also has many of the features from the box that many spend time and effort to install on other flavours.

Ubuntu Studio 8.04 (Hardy Heron) 64Bit

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/8.04/beta/ubuntustudio-8.04-beta-alternate-amd64.iso

Live DVD and Installation on one 1Gb disk

Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon)

Ubuntu.com

Live CD and Installation on one 700Mb disk

Version 7.10 is another great advance for the first time in this distro version we have Eye Candy already installed by default. Ok it's subtle and you may not notice at first any changes but it is different, with a better graphics card such as NVidia or ATI sometimes the Eye Candy is even more remarkable.

Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn)

Ubuntu.com

Live CD and Installation on one 700Mb disk

Ubuntu Version 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support) (Dapper Drake)

Ubuntu.com

Available as a two CD Set the Live CD version and Installable Version

Version 6.06 was a great advance on it's predecessor Version 5.10 installation was much simpler and nearly installed on any hardware presented, it's ability to detect hardware and more importantly the network where also greatly improved.

Distribution Upgrade from version 5.10 to Version 6.06 was abysmal and failed on all units that we tried them on.

Ubuntu Version 5.10 (Breezy Badger)

Ubuntu.com

Available as a two CD Set the Live CD version and Installable Version

This was for all intense and purposes SoSLUG's first introduction to Mark Shuttleworths Linux concept and we loved it. Our original path was to install Gentoo onto our systems this we did with our and the MediaShed servers however this was never a viable option for our limited desktop systems.

Ubuntu had everything we needed except suitable printer and shockwave flash support,

Ubuntu Distributions