Mint Debian

I finally got tired of the old Ubuntu 10.04, which has bee sitting in my main computer for over two years. Instead of a more recent version of Ubuntu or Mint, I replaced it with Mint Debian. I then followed the instruction in this post to install the proprietary NVIDIA driver to get the full power of my graphics card. I really like the simple and elegant design of the Mate desktop and hope I don't ever need to re-install system on this machine ever again (because Mint Debian is a rolling distribution).

Mint Debian

After about eight months, my Mint Debian has been broken beyond reparation. So I decided to wipe it out and do a fresh installation. This time I am not pointing directly to the Debian repository but to the Mint repository.

I like Mint Debian better than Mint main edition. I have come to the conclusion that as long as I am not directly pointing to the Debian repository (or at least not taking every single update everyday), the installation should be stable enough as my main workstation OS.

Disk partition guide for Mint Debian

This post explains how to partition hard disk for Mint Debian.

Debian does not seem to like freepascal and lazarus

After installing the new freepascal 2.4.4 from the debian repository, my mint debian box began to show all kind of problems: chromium stopped working, the usual "./configure, make, make install" stopped working, R stopped working ... Things went back to normal after I uninstalled fp and lazarus.

Gcc and debian testing

The new gcc (4.6.2) was just out a couple of weeks ago and Debian testing has already included it.

Upgrading Mint Debian with Debian source

I finally got tired waiting for the Mint guy to release their next update pack. I just added the Debian testing source and did a complete update. The system is running well so far and shows no sign of breakage.

Mint Debian vs. Mint Ubuntu

Comparing software selection between the Debian-based and Ubuntu-based Mint distros is interesting. On the one hand, the Debian-based distro has the up-to-date packages for Emacs, SBCL, GCC, etc., but outdated version for Firefox, Thunderbird, etc., while the Ubuntu-based distro has updated Firefox, Thunderbird but outdated Emacs, SBCL, etc.

Armadillo in Linux Mint Debian (Xfce)

It took me a while to figure out that I need to specify "g++ -Wall -o "%e" "%f"  -larmadillo -lblas" instead of "g++ -Wall -o "%e" "%f" -larmadillo" to compile the example program provided by the armadillo tar ball under Mint Linux Debian edition.

New Mint Linux Debian is finally here

Looks very promising.

Here is a helpful post about Mint XFCE.

Mint Linux Debian edition

It is highly regarded here, and may provide a way from Ubuntu to Debian.

Here is another positive review.