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.