Episode 62: Mint XFCE

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  • 0:26:49 Review of Linux Mint Xfce

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  • 1:01:30 which —If anyone is wondering where applications are installed just type in which and the name of the application and it tells you the path.

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    11 Replies to “Episode 62: Mint XFCE”

    1. Hezy

      I found your covering of the Dropbox issue too dismissive.
      (1) There is a proven way to encrypt private data on remote systems, and Dropbox don’t even try to follow it. You can take a look at Mozilla’s “Firefox Sync” to learn how it should be done. Encryption keys need not be kept on the server side, only a hash. In this way the identity of the user can be verified without giving the administrators potential access to the data.
      (2) You should not assume that the government can read your files anyway. In a democratic regime government must get a court order to do so, and there are sever restrictions to the process. Don’t give up your rights just because someone in government tells you that security demands it.
      (3) One of you said that Truecypt could have been lying about its security, just like Dropbox did. Well, Truecrypt is a free software, so the proof is the source code.

    2. Joe F

      Hi people,
      Great show – I’m still learning a lot about Linux, and this show has been particularly helpful. Could use some more of Jalu’s tutorials.
      Just writing to say I’m running Mint XFCE on an HP nc6000 with 512 MB ram, Intel Pentium M processor with 1.8 Ghz. Quick, fast, recognized the wireless card (Atheros) with no problem. I was thinking I was going to have to upgrade the Ram, but with the speed that XFCE has, I don’t think I’ll need to.
      A few things that came up for me: the audio button hardware didn’t work ‘out of the box.’ had to download a fix from Mint xfce ‘known problems’ page. The
      ‘tap to click’ functionality of the touchpad didn’t work either, but again, this was a known problem. Took me a while to figure out how to put links to programs on the desktop, so this was a little bit of an issue.
      One other problem, but I don’t know if it is a Mint XFCE issue: if I shut down the laptop with the volume muted, and I start it up again (cold start into Grub), and I un-mute the audio, the audio does not come back on. I have to go into the audio settings and manually un-mute the speakers. Could be an Alsa problem, could be something unique to the HP nc6000. Just thought I’d put it out there.
      Cheers and keep up the good work!

    3. Badwolf9

      Hi people
      Thanks very much for the continuing podcasts. I think you do a great job. I particularly like that the show is focussed and runs along without very long pauses, every second word is ‘like’, ‘awesome’ or whatever. There are only about 3 podcasts on linux that I bother with on a regular basis and yours is one!
      As an Aussie living in Switzerland I try not to let your strange accents bother me ;=)
      I wanted to mention another Dropbox issue that I found recently on another forum:
      http://dereknewton.com/2011/04/dropbox-authentication-static-host-ids/
      This discusses the possibility of someone walking off with your dropbox “config.db” file and having access to all your dropbox data
      As I blogged on my blog recently, I guess you just need to be careful what you trust to others, bit like your front door key or PIN number.
      Anyway, I still dropbox all around the world and find it incredibly useful as a knowledge sharing platform. It is not really less secure than the ftp system we used to have for this purpose.
      regards from the Mittelschweiz
      Martin

    4. daemox

      During the show, the Linux Mint XFCE install is talked about by one of the hosts who mentions the desktop image among other things are not Linux Mint’y but look more like default XFCE. This may have been caused by him mounting his previous Home directory. 🙂

      Good show though, thanks!

      • Scott

        Thanks Daemox. I did mount my “home” partition from my openSUSE 11.04 install. Interesting how that could whack the mint look.

      • Scott

        Thanks for mentioning this. I had intended to point that out during the review. As I did state, I ended up installing Gigilo in order to get network support.

    5. Rick

      Another great show! I enjoyed the in-depth discussion of Mint Xfce, and I got to thinking that maybe I gave up on it too fast. I’ll tweak it a little more this time and set the repositories to Stable, and hopefully it will be an ideal and speedy OS for my netbook.

      I might be wrong, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard you guys discuss Peppermint OS on the show. Seeing as it’s Linux Mint’s sister distro, it would be interested to hear your take on it. I plan on putting it up against Mint Xfce to see which one is the fastest.

      As far as Jolicloud/Joli OS goes, it’s what I’m using now on my netbook, but seeing as its base is Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, it’s a bit bloated and (in my opinion) uses more RAM than necessary. I’m also not impressed with the boot time, which is nearly a minute. Still, it does get some serious style points, and it’s extremely user-friendly. It would be a great introduction to Linux for novices as it’s extremely hard to screw anything up.

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