Don't become unglued, become part of Reglue.

[Edited and Updated to Reflect Changes in the main .iso file]

I'm honored to be able to freely contribute to the Reglue project.
(Humble bow) 

For What it's worth, the official OS of Reglue is SolusOS.

I've done up a re-spun Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon LTS DVD .iso file for the Reglue project. What this rather large .iso file has in it is a few extra educational packages vs the Stock Mint LTS DVD.  Oh, and I did take the liberty of putting a different desktop background on it that I fiddled into existence with the help of the GIMP. 

If you want something smaller for that old PC that doesn't do USB Boots or only has a CD Rom, I also created a smaller CD sized .iso of Mint 13 that you can get here. I Know I Removed:

LibreOffice-core, Tomboy Notes, Mono-Common, Java-Common, Braseo, Thunderbird, Banshee, and the GIMP. (On an offhand note, if you're looking for a 'buntu distro that fits on CD, you might want to take a look at Peppermint.) I highly suggest that you re-install the Java-Common packages, after install, even if you're not a LibreOffice user.

On Both of my re-spin Disks the user name is mint with a blank password.

Username: mint 

Password: 

You'll get the Gnome Classic Desktop by default. And, you'll have to use the terminal to exit the the Gnome Fallback mode, as it doesn't have a log off button ANYWHERE by default. Why that is, is beyond me, but it seem to be a horrible oversight. Horrible.
But you can exit the session with the command line [ gnome-session-quit ] to get to the login screen. 

You can choose a different desktop session from the log on screen, so if you don't get Cinnamon by default, try logging on with Cinnamon enabled. After all that was the point of this adventure, was for me to respin Mint 13 LTS with more packages installed by default, so that Ken / Reglue.org wouldn't have to install them on their project. 

If you plan on installing the larger disk .iso in a VM keep in mind that you'll have to adjust the default disk size from 8 gig to at least 9.

Some of the packages installed are

Google Chrome
Clementine
Audacity
Alarm-Clock
Cups-PDF
Gcompris
Tux Math
Tux typing
Inkscape
Play On Linux
Wine
Wine Tricks
Edubuntu  for Grade schooler
Solarium

And a few more, I didn't keep track of all of them. :/   One note of caution, due to having enabled the backports is that upgrading might seem a bit convoluted, once installed, run mintupdate, twice. If you make the mistake that I did, I logged back on with the Gnome Classic desktop and found myself with nothing more than the Computer Icon, and Home folder Icon. Luckily the right click on the desktop brought up the terminal in Nemo, so I could log off. Then log in with the Cinnamon Desktop. You might also want to make sure that you've upgraded the 

I did find that many of the file associations were not quite right either. Not sure if there was a way to fix that readily from Mintconstuctor, but it would be a good thing to fix. The Good and Bad of the new desktop is that I found that my Wallpapers weren't there by default any longer. They're easy enough to add, but it's still a sniggly pain. There are more wallpapers in the \root\reglue folder. A Ctrl-Right Click will allow you to add them at one time. Not sure if updating or DL the Theme's packages again would fix that issue for the default wallpapers. I think it might. One of the new features in the wallpaper options is to be able to chose a gradient background of two colors. I included two transparent backgrounds in the \reglue-extra folder along with some others so one could take advantage of that.  I can only get the desktop to resize properly in Gnome Classic mode, so here's a screenshot of that.

You can grab the larger Reglue LTS CinaNemo.iso here.

Enjoy! Comments here or on G+ are welcome. 

Bumping up from Mint 10 to Mint 13 via Mint Backup

I really wanted to document this a little bit more so I could have had a fresher brain dump of what I did for this post.  I did a post back when Mint 9 LTS came out, about the changes and tweaking that I did to it to get it more like the Ubuntu (8?ish) experience that I had come to enjoy.  Much of what I had done had become even more do-able with Ubuntu Tweak as that GAVE back much of what Ubuntu and Canonical and been shunting along the way to simplify the OS. You can't give someone a 5 speed, and expect them to be happy with "3 on the tree" with a newer model just for the sake of "simplicity".

I also like the idea of the LTS release. As I do tend to add this and that to my system. So, for this update I decided to try out the Mint Backup Tool. While Mint backup does do some things simply, it's far from perfect.  It also takes quite a bit of time for 200 gigabytes of data. Would I use it to easily pick and choose dir's that I'd want to back up to another drive? Definitely. Would I use it to back up my software selection? Absolutely.  Getting a copy of your data to another location it worked very well.  Where the problem comes in, or the pain, is when you do your restore.

The APT repositories or PPA's that are on a default system are added automatically. Those that aren't you have to go back and add manually.

Also, since I was moving from a Gnome2 system to MATE, I had some duplication of programs,  such as Gedit, AND Pluma, XScreensaver AND Gnome Screensaver, but that proved interesting, as I have two monitors, and there were two different screen savers going at the same time.

A Good majority of my dir's were given ROOT permissions, so I had to go back and change those later. I'm not sure if it was my fumbling around, by not restoring things in the correct order or not. Meaning, I restored my software selection prior to restoring my file directories. The tutorial did it the other way around.

One of the first things that I added was the Ubuntu Tweak PPA, and Downloaded the Google Chrome browser via Firefox. Yes, I'm not as FOSS sensitive as some of my other Linux Brethren.  I've also moved my music and plan on moving other large directories to another drive and link to them, so when I DO backup things in the future, they're more segmented. So, more or less whatever I've created is on one partition, and more static files, like Music, Videos, etc, would be on another.

Overall, I'd say that the Mint Backup utility did it's job. It DID back things up well. Restoring was much quicker, than backing up. I'd give it 4 out of 5. The ability to use a GUI to pick and choose what to backup or restore is slick. But some directories, such as my ./lastpass dir or any other "Piped" dir wouldn't backup, and hang the process, so you'd have to start over. With 200 GB, it took quite a bit of time. 8 hrs or more. On a system such as my wife's who's \home dir was only 2GB I suspect it would be much quicker, though, on her machine, I just did a clean install.

So tell me, have you used Mint Backup?
If so would you use it again?

I think I might, but not all the time. Sometimes a fresh install is just, well, Minty Fresh. :)



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Linux Mint 9 (RC 1) 2nd post.

More tweaking for Mint 9. Can you See why I don't like to update every 6 months, it takes me 1-2 months to get the thing "just right".  There are some other ways to go about it, and when I find those, I'll post about them also.  But I'm going from a fresh install to what it is that I'd like. I'd like to keep to a minimal amount of tweaking, but I think that's just crazy talk.

I'm also thinking that I'll have to make up a list of the changes I did over the first month. - If I still have free time to do so.

So, this week, we've got:

gThumb image edit and viewer. "gThumb is an image viewer and browser for the GNOME Desktop. It also includes an importer tool for transferring photos from cameras." It also allows for some quick cropping of files. One of the features that I use the most.

Also got Ubuntu One setup, and have Tomboy Notes backing up to that folder, don't know what else I'll be doing with that, But I'll be fiddling with Tomboy Notes a little more. It's been a while since I've done much with them, but they're kinda handy.  Check them out if you haven't. - I first used the Synaptic Package Manager to install it, but think that they've got a .deb file to run for the last two versions of Ubuntu.

Added Alarm Clock  Since I don't have Evolution and it's one useful item that I did use with it, was the alarm clock. - I also added to this my Mashpodder script to run three times a week. Yea, I know there's a way to do a Cron Job, for those of you who are command line jockey's. But I've not tried that yet, nor do I think I could walk someone else how to do a cron job. - Part of "My Linux Experiment" is to be able to figure out some things without to much command line, using obvious solutions in the repo's. Trust me, I'd like to be able to take the time to bounce around on it, but it's not something some people would find very user friendly.

Installed Grsync. Simple backup utility. - And that reminds me, I've not taken the time to look at the Mint Backup program. - I need to do that. It's faster then Nautilus for moving large chunks of files etc,  I'm using it now to move stuff from one USB drive to another. I've a drive that has a large FAT32 partition, and I just don't need that around for anything. Moving to EXT3, and of course GParted to perform this feat.

Oh! The one additive that I thought should be included with all GNOME installs or the ones that have Rythmbox is the Nautilus enqueuer plugin for Rhythmbox. Oh yea. I know for some this might seem sorta goofy, but heck, I used to love Amarok, and the fact that it USED to behave a lot like WinAmp, and was for the most part, REALLY GOOD.  With a million different programs out there that will play music on a Linux box... that don't really do anything special, I'm digressing.. Ok, Ok,  I like to be able to bounce around in the file manager and load up a few Podcasts or Tunes.  OR both. But there wasn't really a clear path to do it, or program that DID for me it out of the box with my Linux Experience two years ago, except for Amarok. KDE4 killed off the old player, and the new player just looks wrong, and left me wanting. RythmBox kinda sorta still does, but it's the default Gnome do-dad music thingy and It'll do just fine.

Themes! We mustn't forget the Themes. The AirLines: A New Bisigi Project Gnome Theme is a gorgeous theme. And has a background that changes from daytime to nighttime. Here, better yet, check out the Bisigi Project home page.  A handful of very very stunning themes. - Ubuntu didn't need to move the silly buttons, they could have just added one of these to their default install, and it would have made Ubuntu (or Mint in my case now) a gorgeous desk top that would rust the pixels on any "Brushed Aluminum" crud that the Apple cart has to offer.

That's about it. I don't expect to add much more, or to tweak much more.  I think now, I'll concentrate on getting my personal files sorted out and organized.

Linux Mint 9 is has finally made my laptop work the way it was intended. The Sound Card Issues aren't there, I can use my headphone jack on my Toshiba Satellite A135 now, I can hook it up to the TV with the S-Video port, something I wasn't able to do until now.  I haven't tried the mic jack as of yet, but at the moment, that's a non-issue for me.  Nor have I tried Audacity, or a few other programs that will find their way on my Linux Box.

Have a Great day!