In Debian, I had been having problems getting software mixing working with the Intel HDA sound card integrated into my mother board. I decided to try Linux Mint again, knowing it had excellent multimedia support. I had tried it when it first showed up on the seen and remember being impressed with it at the time and wanted to give it another go.Linux mint handled software mixing from the beginning. Whoever has said that “Linux is not ready for the desktop.” has not tried Linux Mint.

It is built from Ubuntu as the base using Gnome, but adds a lot of its own configuration tools, adapted synaptic package, and a nice menu system. The installation is from a live CD and will be familiar to anyone installing Ubuntu or Fedora from live media. The menu system allows for easy search and access to all your applications and ability to bookmark you favorite applications.

Once installed I could watch flash on YouTube and Hulu, listen to mp3s and watch wmv, mpg and avi movies. At first I could use totem to play a comercial (encripted) dvd, but then a few days latter when i tried again, it wouldn’t work leaving me to install VLC. I could not find a solution online; however, others have experienced the same problem. All the applications a desktop user would need where installed, OpenOffice, Firefox, gFTP, pidgin, Transmission, etc. One criticism, was the inclusion of Gnome M Player, M player and Totem seemed redundant.

The crowning achievement of this distribution is that it is multimedia capable from a fresh install. I only had to install the proprietary nVidia drivers via the standard restricted drivers interface common in Ubuntu. Once done, enabling Compiz effects was easy as in Ubuntu. Though Mint is built from Ubuntu as a foundation, it is more then a simple Ubuntu remaster, with the time and detail spent to polishing the user interface, installing all needed media codecs, flash and java. It has the task bar and menu along the bottom, making it comfortable to anyone migrating from the Windows world.

I bought a new case a few weeks ago, The Cooler Master Elite 360. I have gone through my share of computer cases in my time, and the Elite 360 by Cooler Master has been one of the better in the lot. To begin with it is has a screwless design for optical and hard drive bays which actually works. I have had screwless designed cases before and usually found that my optical drives would stick out a bit or not enough, or that the fit for hard drives was to tight, and the screwless mechanisms would jam.  No the Elite 360. It comes with side stripes that you plug into the screw holes of your drive and slides right in and with a click their are firmly secured. The case also has a versicle design that it can stand up like a tower, or sit down like a desktop.  I sit it down and slid it into the vc/dvd player space of an old TV stand I use for my computer equipment. It can handle both ATX and Mico ATX, and was one of the more easier cases to build a system with. The one down side is my MicroATX motherboard comes right to the edge of where the 3.5 bay for a flopy sits. I tried fitting a regular sized hard drive there, but found that edge of the mother board allowed for no room to plug in the sata or power cables, where the IDE connector was in the way. However, that really cannot be faulted to the Case. It did fit an old full size ATX motherboard, which shortly gave up the ghost (that is when I moved my main system into it.)  It comes with one 120mm fan which is nice and quite with good airflow, and has additional room for a second 120mm fan above the CPU and a 92mm fan on the left (when laying down as a desktop).  the one thing I would have liked is if it where made of Aluminum instead of steel. Check it out at NewEgg.com

The QuickCam c500 is supported out of the box in Debian Squeeze by the UVC driver. However, one issue I have encountered is the built in microphone is auto detected by alas and overrides my sound card, forcing me to issue the command (as root):

alsa force-reload

to solve this problem edit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf and add:

alias snd-card-0 snd_hda_intel
alias snd-card-1 snd_usb_audio

Reboot and hopefully all is well.

NOTE: you may have to change snd_hda_intal to match whatever sound device your computer has.

there are a few things that bug me about Windows 7, and one of them is that it no longer is obvious how to show my file extensions. I hate how the default on windows installs has been to hide file extensions. I like to know what it is I am looking at. Is it an executable, is it ogg or mp3, maybe avi or mpeg? Before I simply would change my preferences from the tool bar. Whell the simple tool bar I have become so accustome to is no longer the same. So, what to do?

Open Windows Explorer and click Organize at the top left and then select Folder Options. Now go to the View tab and there it is, looking much like it did in Windows XP. For whatever reason this was not readily evident to me and it might not be for others.

In the past I have described how to make Dropbox work with Thunar for XFCE users, now I am going to see If I can achieve the same goal for KDE. Dropbox is a great utility which remotely stores documents and other files, and can sync them across multiple computers over the Internet. what I did was to follow the instructions provided by Dread Knight. Afterwards, I figured out that this method could be used for any Linux desktop environment or windows manager and is preferable to the Thunar method mentioned above. If you need, create a Dropbox account here.

I have made a package for this and added it to the Oojah!Repo for public use on Debian based systems.