Green Tech Girl

Linux Mint 6: Felicia

I’ve been using Linux Mint instead of Ubuntu for a while, and overall I’m pleased with it. However, since upgrading from Linux Mint 5 (Elyssa) to 6 (Felicia), I’ve actually been a little less happy with it. A few irksome problems:

Flash: Seemingly minor but not really when a lot of your work requires you to be online a lot: Flash is screwed on Felicia. I’m not sure why, but there have been reports around the net from frustrated users who went to great lengths to reinstall the operating system just to get this minor feature to work. I did find that Flash in the Opera browser seems to work, but the browser is not very stable. This is enough of a hindrance that I find myself sticking to (ugh) Vista for most daily tasks. Waiting for an upgrade for this to be fixed.

New Software Manager: The new software manager actually removes features that made me prefer Mint to Ubuntu. Notably, I’m disappointed that I can’t use the graphical “apt-get” feature anymore. Bummer.

Menu: With the addition of separate buttons for shutting down and suspending, my menu has gotten bloated and I now have to scroll to see all the icons on the bottom left corner. I can’t seem to be able to resize the menu. Perhaps a minor complaint, but interface for me is important. I’m also getting less happy with Gnome’s flat, boring themes. I can’t seem to find a middle ground between KDE4′s bloatware and Gnome’s boringware.

ATI Drivers: Apparently, the new versions of xorg do not work well with ATI graphics cards. This is not really Mint’s fault, but really…can we just get ATI cards to work in Linux already? So many people have them, and they never work out of the box. I have held back on upgrading my ATI video laptop due to this issue.

On the positive: On my non-ATI laptop, I can finally get dual windows to work where the screen stretches across from one monitor to the other. Finally!

I still love Linux, but I really feel that basic things such as Flash need to work out of the box in order to make Linux something regular people can use. Right now, with all the little buggy things going on with my Linux distributions, I can’t really recommend the operating system to anyone who isn’t a bit of a nerd, and that’s a shame.

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Obama’s Perpetual Campaign Mode

Aren’t any environmentalists even slightly disturbed by the excessive traveling Obama has done during his short tenure in office? It seems the left loved to bash Bush for being on vacation all the time, but wants to give Obama a pass on his constant use of jet fuel. Is there any carbon-offsetting done for Air Force One? I doubt it.

The latest – Obama will be flying off to Denver on Tuesday to sign the stimulus package in a ridiculous canned photo op, a stimulus package that doesn’t do enough for alternative energy and is likely to put this country into a debt hole we’ll never get out of.

Starry-eyed Obama supporters are gushing at how this shows he’s a man of the people – c’mon people, a real man of the people doesn’t have a private jet to fly around in at the snap of his fingers. Now if he drove across country in a beat up station wagon ala “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” then we’d be on to something!

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Weatherizing Homes: Not Inspiring!

I thought the following clip of Jon Stewart was pretty funny – especially where he describes Obama’s plan to weatherize homes as a snoozefest. I’m not opposed to weatherizing homes, but I’d still like to see a grander, bolder plan for energy independence. Weatherizing homes won’t get us off of oil. It will help, but it’s just a drop in the bucket ultimately.

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