I’ve struggled with some shit in my day but I have officially thrown in the hat when it comes to installing Linux Mint 15. First off, it won’t boot. Not just on my physical desktop, but even as a virtual system. I wasted so much of my time trying to track down the issues. First I thought UNetbootin was to blame, so I switched apps that write .iso’s to USB. Still no go. I finally discovered the issue on my desktop. I have a Intel i3 Ivy Bridge CPU with Intel HD graphics. The loader was using some invalid mode my monitor couldn’t support so after the boot my screen went and stayed blank until I found a trick. i915.modeline=0. That’s great you can install Linux Mint, hurray, but guess what. The damn thing still won’t boot and using i915.modeline=0 in GRUB won’t fix it. Screw it I give up trying to make it work right as dual-boot, so I’ll run it in a virtual machine. WRONG. The damn thing STILL WON’T BOOT.
Put the brakes on. This is a distro targeted at end users. Those end users have desktop systems, laptops, lots of different hardware to support right? So whats the issue here Linux Mint? Is my hardware really that unique? Every other distro boots and runs great, but it so happens the top ranked distro on distrowatch is more hassle than its worth on my hardware – or virtualized hardware for that matter.
I’m back to the drawing board. Since I primarily use CentOS or Debian (now I know why..), I’m going to use one of them as my desktop. Its been a long time since I’ve fired up Debian so I’m thinking I’ll be investing more time in that relationship, so stay tuned.