Hello Mint

Having got fed up with the direction Canonical are taking with Ubuntu, I have spent the last month flirting with other distros to see which would be a good fit. My only requirement was that it had to have Gnome 2 out of the box and a fairly hassle free install on my laptop.

For the time being, I have gone with Linux Mint Debian Edition which is a heady cocktail of Mint, Debian and Debian-Multimedia repositories and suits my pragmatic approach to non-free extras.  So, it's installed and I have got everything to work – in fact, my desktop looks identical and only the Mint branded GDM login screen gives the game away.

Hardware Issues

Sound


00:14.2 Audio device: ATI Technologies Inc SBx00 Azalia (Intel HDA)

This was the first distro not to play nicely with my soundcard and was fixed by downloading hda-verb and appending the following to

/etc/rc.local/usr/local/sbin/hda-verb /dev/snd/hwC0D0 0x01 SET_GPIO_MASK 3
/usr/local/sbin/hda-verb /dev/snd/hwC0D0 0x01 SET_GPIO_DIRECTION 1/usr/local/sbin/hda-verb /dev/snd/hwC0D0 0x01 SET_GPIO_DATA 1

Don't ask me why, but it just worked.

Broadcom


05:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN (rev 01)

As ever, my BCM4311 wifi card failed to be detected and was quickly fixed by:


sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installersudo modprobe b43

Here's a screenshot.