Blog blog("Baptiste Wicht"); (Posts about Mint)

Switching to Gentoo Linux

Baptiste Wicht — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 07:28:37 GMT

After having switched to Mint from Ubuntu, I'm on the verge of switching to Gentoo Linux.

Gentoo is a powerful operating system base on Linux. This operating system provides extreme configurability and performance. Gentoo is very lightweight on its own, by default, there is not even a window manager installed. A big advantage of this system is that you can customize your system to your exact needs. You can use it as a server, a desktop distribution or whatever you needs. You install only the program you needs. This advantage leads to an inconvenient: you will need an advanced knowledge on Linux to install your system. Indeed, you will have to configure your kernel, choose compilation flags, choose your packages carefully and know your hardware as well.

Gentoo is based on a very powerful software distribution system, Portage. Portage is used to install new packages, get the latest software for Gentoo or upgrade your system. Except for some proprietary software, all the packages are built from the sources. This allow to a deep customization of your software. The installation of some package can take a big amount of time to compile. Count at least several hours to install a system based on Gnome Shell for example.

If you plan to install a full installation of Gentoo, reserve some days for that. I've spent several days working on my installation before getting to something fully working.

Here is my current configuration:

Gentoo operating system
Linux Kernel 3.3
Gnome Shell 3.2.1
Google Chrome 18
NVidia Drivers 295.33
...

As I've stripped my kernel and my init scripts to the maximum, my boot time is much faster and my installation takes much less space than my Mint installation.

I said that I'm on the verge of switching because I still have some applications that are not installed on my new Gentoo distribution. For example, I have no multimedia support for now, but I already spent most of my time on my new distribution.

I will try to write some posts on Gentoo in the future.

Install the Insight Debugger on Linux Mint (works for Ubuntu too)

Baptiste Wicht — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:28:41 GMT

Insight is a very good debugger based on gdb. I prefer it over ddd or kdbg as I find it clearer and easier to use. Moreover, this debugger is also the one used in the book Assembly language Step by Step, for Linux. However, Insight has been removed from Debian packages already more than a year ago.

But, thanks to SevenMachines, a PPA repository is available to install it on Linux Mint (works also on Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based Linux distributions).

To add the repository to your apt sources, add the following lines to the /etc/apt/sources.list file:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/sevenmachines/dev/ubuntu natty main 
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/sevenmachines/dev/ubuntu natty main

and update your apt sources:

sudo apt-get update

Then you can install insight:

sudo apt-get install insight

And now you are ready to use Insight as your debugger.

If you don't trust this PPA repository, you can also try it to install it from the sources (http://sources.redhat.com/insight/), but doesn't seem to very simple to install it. I wasn't able to build it on my Linux Mint 12.

Install Cinnamon in Linux Mint - A forked Gnome Shell

Baptiste Wicht — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 07:11:19 GMT

In the last Linux Mint version (12), the developers have introduced a set of extensions to the Gnome Shell, Mint Gnome Shell Extensions (MGSE).

But, plugins can't do everything the developers want. So they forked Gnome Shell and started building their own shell : Cinnamon.

At the time of writing, the appearance of this new shell is similar to MGSE in Linux Mint 12, but with some differences : only one status bar, the left bottom menu was changed, notification bar in the bottom bar, ...

You can try it on your Linux Mint right now :

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cinnamon-session

Then, you have to logout and select Cinnamon in the Logon screen as the desktop environment.

Personally, I still prefer MGSE, because I like having two bars, but that will perhaps change with some more tests on Cinnamon. And you, what do you think about Cinnamon ? Or about MGSE ?

If you want more informations about this new shell, you can read the official site.