If you’re into the whole Linux thing, you might be interested in Linux Mint. It’s an Ubuntu-base distribution and aims to ship with more of the software one might expect of Windows and the likes. Personally, I like the GTK theme Mint uses over Ubuntu’s (though, I don’t like GTK in general). Let’s take a look:

Unlike Ubuntu, the Linux Mint folks have altered the default layout of the theme to be more in line with Windows. I kinda like the application (Mint?) menu, though it is a little buggy. Admittedly, some of the mouse-overs on the various submenus are a bit of a nuisance. Though, being as it’s based on Ubuntu 9.04, the fonts look really quite nice.

Here’s a shot of the terminal window:

Interestingly, sound worked right off the bat for me–and they’re using PulseAudio.

All in all, it looks like it’ll be worthwhile to play around with. I might even install it on a spare drive!

If you like Ubuntu, give it a try.

I run Gentoo on my desktop. It lives on a separate drive, and I use it from time to time whenever I have Linux-related work to do. Recently, though, the install has been feeling its age and certain things have required extensive changes to the base system (specifically new versions of device-mapper).

This post is a warning to anyone wishing to switch to baselayout-2:

MAKE SURE YOUR SYSTEM IS UPDATED BEFORE MIGRATING!

If you’ve used and built packages from source, chances are you’ve run into some derivation of this dreadful message:

libtool: link: `/usr/lib/libgnomevfs-2.la' is not a valid libtool archive

Unfortunately, there are a few potential causes ranging from broken packages to missing packages, but in general, they are the result of broken dependencies (missing packages are broken dependencies, after all!). Read on about some potential workarounds and solutions!