Linux Mint 4.0 as Enterprise Laptop

The last two posts I did here had to do with using a data center grade version of Linux to create a production level, critical service. The upside to using such a Linux is supposed to be stability and predictability. Everything tested. Everything settled and stable. Calm. Quiet. Maybe even a little boring.

The downside? Not the latest kernel or packages, therefore not the latest features. Do we need the latest? Maybe. NFS Version 4 and IPv6 are going to be challenges in the near future. Linux has had support for these things for a long long time, but now we are starting to see some systems from several vendors enabling them *by default*.

Running a data center is always about balancing the value of the new features against the change and disruption they bring, and none of that has much to do most of the time with the way we run an R&D Datacenter. R&D *has* to be out there in front, so we are always force to adopt and adapt to new technologies by our customer far faster than what is probably normal for a data center.

I point out all this to re-iterate a point I have made about the Linux Enterprise desktop before, but that bears a quick repeat: While Linux is ready to be an Enterprise desktop right now today, chances are that a centrally supported/managed desktop image means that a cross enterprise standard Linux desktop image is *not* based off the latest and greatest version of Linux, but something like SLED/Novell or RedHat Enterprise Linux Desktop. And in some ways that is a shame. There is nothing wrong with them per se, but...

Linux evolves so quickly that all sorts of nifty new feature/function that Linux Desktop users would probably love to have is also probably only in the newer releases. This rapid evolution is not even all Linux's fault. The underlying hardware, especially laptops, move quickly too. Example: By the time I received my Dell D620 laptop, I could not order one from Dell, because they had moved on to the D630, and had substantial hardware changes to the unit that Linux would have to deal with, such as moving from the old low end Intel 945 graphics card to the new X3100. Only the newer Xorg servers included with the new release of the distro have full support for this new chipset. If you want things like Compiz Fusion to really shine, you have to be on the new release... and in fact, Compiz Fusion is itself only on the newest releases! Before that Compiz and Beryl were still separate things. I do admire how fast they merged though.

Unless the strategy is moving everyone to thin clients (and that is perfectly do-able with Linux, although it seems unlikely for laptops) then rapid certification and provisioning is what is going to make the end users happy with these fresh new releases. Another reason to go Web 2.0, since that decreases your desktop certification efforts immensely. All you have to know is whether or not Firefox or Opera as shipped on the latest Linux works with your AJAX application and you are done. You could really care less about most of the rest of it. OK. You might care. Adrian Monk would of course, but I digress.

Hey: What about Mint then?

Right... right. getting there. All that was to say that I freely admit that I am an early adopter. I am always interested in / curious about how well the bleeding edge stuff is doing. In part, it is how I give back to Open Source too: Problems that I and my early adopter fellow geeks can find and report on the edge make the further back products more stable when they come along.

Mint 4.0 is about as bleeding edge as it gets as of this writing. Fedora 8 and OpenSuse 10.3 are already getting old it would seem. Life on the edge is fleeting for a Linux Distro. Mint is based on Ubuntu 7.10, and there is all sorts of new nifty goodness there: I read that for the Ubuntu folks 7.10 was a chance to get out there and get as many new features in as they could because it was not going to be one of their extended (LTS) support releases.

I installed Ubuntu 7.10 on the Dell D620 for a few weeks, and I have to say that I did not get the feeling that it was in any way an *unstable* release, for all its new features and currency. What I was curious about was what Mint was going to do to add to the already polished and updated feel that Ubuntu had. 7.10 was the best Ubuntu I had ever installed, and it seemed at the time that they were not leaving much for Mint to do. But it turns out that was not at all correct. Mint takes Ubuntu's refinement to yet another level. I love the artwork, which is a refinement of 3.0's. Kind of a carbon fiber / modern look, without looking tacky like some carbon fiber themes I have seen.

If current releases of Linux like Ubuntu 7.10 are where the bleeding edge stuff is, and Extended support / enterprise releases are where the centrally supported Linux desktop crowds want to be, then Mint is to Ubuntu 7.10 what Ubuntu 7.10 is to 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support). Slicker, newer, more features, etc.

Here then are some of the specifics.

Evolution

I can not talk about an Enterprise Linux desktop, at least in a Microsoft Exchange email server based shop without bringing up Evolution first. Evolution with its MS Exchange connector is still the best way to let a Linux person communicate with MS WIndows / Outlook using counterparts in their environment. In a perfect world MS would be more open about their mail protocols, or Production IT shop might lose their fascination with MS Exchange in exchange for a more standard set of server protocols (whew... that was a hard sentence to type...), but if you have to deal with MS Exchange, you probably want Evolution.

Mint as near as I can tell does not add anything to the underlying Evolution packages. They appear to be exactly the same as the ones Ubuntu ships, namely:

evolution 2.12.1-0ubuntu1
evolution-common 2.12.1-0ubuntu
evolution-data-server 1.12.1-0ubuntu1
evolution-data-server-common 1.12.1-0ubuntu1
evolution-dbg 2.12.1-0ubuntu1
evolution-exchange 2.12.0-0ubuntu1
evolution-plugins 2.12.1-0ubuntu1
evolution-webcal 2.12.0-0ubuntu1
nautilus-sendto 0.10-0ubuntu1
openoffice.org-evolution 1:2.3.0-1ubuntu5

The bad news here is that only the base Evolution package has a debugging version currently available. The good news is that 2.12 has so far been a pretty trouble free version so that I have not yet *had* to report any problems. This is true for both Ubuntu 7.10 and Mint 4.0.

Backing up to the Install

Installing Mint 4.0 is exactly the same as Ubuntu 7.10 was, or Mint 3.1, or Mint 3.0 or Ubuntu 7.04... Same installer. Same LiveCD boot. What is different is that when I booted on the Live CD, Compiz fusion was enabled by default, and appeared to work without any problems at all. Once it was installed to the hard drive though, Compiz was *disabled* by default. Kinda weird. It *knew* it worked. 

My main complaint about the install is the same one I have had for a while, which is that Ubuntu nor Mint can seem to figure out that there is already a Linux installed on the hard drive, and does not ask if I want to re-use the existing /home. Every time I have to go into manual disk layout mode and force it to format "/", but otherwise leave the disk alone. My didsk layout has not changed on this laptop since I first built it:

Disk /dev/sda: 80.0 GB, 80026361856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00019fb7

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1        1824    14651248+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda2   *        1825        3040     9767520   83  Linux
/dev/sda3            3041        3283     1951897+  82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4            3284        9729    51777495   83  Linux

SDA2 is "/". SDA4 is "/home". Really, this is an easy configuration to figure out. Anyone that wanted their data to survive an upgrade would do something like this. Further, Fedora and OpenSUSE both can figure out at install that the userid in "/home" called "steve" is the same one as the new one it just asked me to create during the install. They ask if they should reuse the home directory, and change the UID to whatever makes them internally happy. Going back the other way, Ubuntu / Mint have no idea. I have to fix the UID on the files manually. Going from Ubuntu 7.10 to Mint 4.0 was no problem though. 

Fedora and OpenSUSE are both starting to use LiveCD installs at least as options, but neither of them has it down to as few a number of steps. If Mint / Ubuntu were a bit smarter about disk layout, it would be even fewer install steps!

The rest of the story

I came back from vacation, after a week of not even looking at a computer other than my iPhone, and had one day before I had to get on a plane and fly from the swamplands to our Sunnyvale office. My D620 was running Ubuntu 7.10 without issue, and so I did the only thing I could do before a long business trip where the Linux laptop would be my one and only connection back to the home office. I upgraded it from Ubuntu 7.10 to Mint 4.0, because 4.0 had gone GA while I was on vacation, and based on everything I know about Mint, I expected no issues. There were none. Mint dropped in like a champ, and I could starting looking at the nifty new tools like the MintUpdate and the updated stuff like the MintDesktop 

One may wonder why the world needs yet another updater. I can use Synaptic or Adept to do this after all. But I really like the classification of risk information that MintUpdate provides, and think it is a valuable addition. MintDesktop fixes the problem I have with finding where Gnome buried some settings, especially how to turn off "Spatial Mode" in Nautilus. Mint 4.0 continues to default to providing their SLED like default menu, and I guess that means there are people that like it. I must not only be an early adopter but an outlier when it comes to the value of certain features. Whatever. I know how to turn back on the Gnome default menus in no time at all now, so it is not hurting me. I left the SLED-like menu turned on, with its codename "Daryna" displaying (at the bottom: Gnome standard menus at the top), and mess with it from time to time to see if I can figure out why it is still here. After all, I did not get why Ubuntu was so popular all that long ago. I have to be open to new things in this world of Open Source, or I will be run over by the rate-of-paradigm-change truck. I hate that truck sometimes though. :)

GUI Goodness

I found the place to turn back on Compiz fusion (System / Preferences / Appearance / Visual Effects), and loaded up the Emerald theme manager (with Synaptic), which now works with Compiz (Beryl is nowhere to be found: It really is married back into Compiz). I played around with a few themes, and settled on one with transparent edged windows that let me see behind the current window, which is useful. The effects are set to "Normal", as the "Extra" level of effects acted weird on the D620's low-end 945GM graphics card. I am not a measure of what others want here: If the effect does not provide me an actual useful function, I turn it off in favor of speed anyway. I know many like the glitz just because it is fun to watch.

The down side is I can not find a higher level of effect control than this off/normal/extra or the Gnome GL desktop control. I am sure it is around, but it is not obvious. There is an effect missing from Beryl that I want back. When I hover the task bar, I want to see the composited mini-version of the window for that task. That was just too handy!

Other than that, "Normal" setting of Compiz has been stable and is pretty crisp. I have the D620 sitting right next to my MacBook Pro right now, and it is interesting to see how similar the window shadowing looks to what OS.X 10.5 does. OS.X really stepped up the drama of these shadows in the new release, but Compiz is not far behind it.

Just Call Me Compatible

One of the things I like about Linux, and especially Mint / Ubuntu is how easy it is to load up additional software so that I can co-exist with my OS.X system. Sure, it comes pretty tweaked out for MS Windows co-existence already, and while I do have to be compatible at the office with those folks, in my personal life there is no MS Windows. Only Linux amd OS.X. Synaptic makes short work of putting on Avahi, Avahi Service Discovery, Macutils, HFS support, plus stuff like ACPI Sensors, HDDtemp, gkrellm and so on. My current system temps are CPU 47C, Hard Drive 38C. I knew you'd want to know that.... actually it is interesting that the IBM Thinkpads appear to have far more sensors on them. When I run ACPI and IBM-ACPI on them, I see so many thermal zones I can not display them all in the task bar and leave room for anything else. The Macbook Pro is like that too. This D620 only has two. It runs cool though.

A Week and Counting

Mint 4.0 has been the main way I have done work for the last week. I have done presentations with OpenOffice (saved to .ppt for the MS users that needed it), looked at spreadsheets, read email, scheduled and accepted meetings, updated task lists, searched contacts.... all the usual office kind of stuff. The only problem I had was Evolution seemed really slow looking up email addresses, and I found out I forgot to update the GAL (Global Address List) server to the right one, so that was my fault. Evo defaults to picking the first GAL server it can find in the alphabet, which in this case is on the other side of the planet from me. Once I had that set to point at a server in the same country, that problem went away.

Mint 4.0, and its underlying Ubuntu 7.10 may be bleeding edge (2.6.22 kernel) but so far it is stable, fast, pretty, and high function as well. The only reason I can see why this would not be a good enterprise laptop / desktop OS for everyone would be that pesky amount of time it takes to certify new OS releases by the central support team.