Today I worked on my own systems a bit.
First, I now remember why I don’t like Mint: They have an irresponsible attitude about security and bug-fix updates coming from their upstream source, Ubuntu. You really have to go out of your way to get those updates. There are other problems with Mint, but that’s a big one.
Second, I’ve really been trying to harmonize my desktop and laptop on one OS. I really like Xubuntu and have been trying to overcome the known problems. So I got it all working fine on my desktop. When you install the old “seahorse” package, it allows you encrypt your passwords for Chrome/Chromium browser, for example. That was a major complaint of mine. I suppose on Windows you’ll have to use something like KeePass or another cloud-based password encryption service. Several of them are free and have a free add-on for Chrome.
The laptop remained a bigger issue. This is a Toshiba Satellite C855D-S5104 — one of dozens of models all rather similar but with slight variations in hardware configuration. Almost everything works out of the box; it was easy to accept the standard offered FGLRX proprietary driver for the Radeon video chipset. The big problem here is the RealTek 8188CE wifi chipset. Starting around the 12.04 release, the various version of Ubuntu started having trouble keeping the connection alive. The solution was simply waiting long enough for the backports team of build an updated driver set for the various wireless chipsets. They took the work from a team of Linux kernel developers who took the time to recode the most recent drivers so that they can be built for earlier kernels. At any rate, on the Ubuntus, you simply enable the “backport” repo and look for a more recent backport of the collected wireless drivers (linux-backports-modules-cw-3.8-precise-generic-pae was the one I used). For now, it seems to hold a steady connection with my wifi. The alternative is building the driver yourself, and there are some clumsy extra precautions you have to take the make sure it installs properly. Then you have to do it again every time the kernel gets an update. I’d rather not try to teach that to my clients.
That’s the whole point of this exercise: Making sure I understand and use what I intend to recommend to others. I’m getting the hang of it. This particular version of Xubuntu comes with a WINE package that runs MS Office 2003, for example. I don’t have to install a virtual machine. Most of this is stuff I can teach to clients with relative ease.
