Waiting for Vanessa

[GeoffF100]

It has been announced that Linux Mint 21 Vanessa will enter Beta before the 15th of this month. That is behind the originally announced schedule. Hopefully, Vanessa will be released by the end of next month.

I am currently using Xubuntu 20.04 LTS. Snaps take horribly long to load, and Canonical has been shipping Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with Firefox as a Snap. It is horribly slow to load and there has been an outcry. Canonical is working to speed it up, but acknowledges that it will still be slower than it used to be. Mint is ideologically opposed to Snaps (which rely on an app store owned by Canonical, a commercial company) as has persuaded Mozilla to provide a .deb file for Firefox. I want to be Snap free!

I am planning to migrate to Linux Mint Xfce, following in Snorvey's sure footsteps.

[GeoffF100]

Here is a video showing the new features:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4ekYSOlt1w

[GeoffF100]

The Beta version has been released:

https://betanews.com/2022/07/12/linux-m ... essa-beta/

[GeoffF100]

Here is a review of the Beta:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgBxliuC32g

[GeoffF100]

Vanessa has been released:

https://blog.linuxmint.com/

Here is a preview of the Xfce edition:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy1PCgOUkP4

[servodude]

spun this up on an old 11" Dell Inspiron laptop that was sitting doing nothing (dual core celeron N3050)

tried the full fat Cinnamon desktop in the first instance and it feels pretty snappy (tried xfce after and it wasn't noticeably faster )
installed cheese to check the webcam and put on the chromium browser
- everything just works (after I realised the touchpad defaults were a bit different from how I'd expect them to be)

impressed
-sd

[GeoffF100]

I tried the Xfce edition. Nothing much changed since Ulyana, which is no surprise. Inspired by servodude's post, I then tried the Cinnamon edition. It looked a bit unfamiliar to start with, but I soon found where things were. It was fast even my slower machine (3rd generation i3), which is nonetheless much faster than servodude's test machine. Last time around, I used Xubuntu rather than Mint Xfce, because of issues with the Themes, which have not been fixed. Cinnamon work flawlessly there. I was able to change from green to aqua without the green lingering on in places. I think I will go with Cinnamon this this time.

[GeoffF100]

Another victory for Mint from Explaining Computers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaCwLjIf3sU

Mint was the most successful Linux installation on a Surface Pro tablet. Indeed the only one that looks usable.

[GeoffF100]

I hit a problem with Firefox failing to restore the position of its window when it was reloaded:

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic. ... 0&t=379398

Vanessa has lots of other bugs apparently. Installing Linux Mint 20.3 Una seems to be a better option.

[GeoffF100]

I have tried downloading LM 20.3 Cinnamon twice. It failed the integrity check in the same way on both occasions. All my downloads have succeeded on previous occasions, and I have followed exactly the same procedure. I will put up with LM 21 for now.

[Breelander]

Vanessa has been released....

And now we have the upgrade instructions...

How to upgrade to Linux Mint 21
August 8, 2022 by Clem
If you’ve been waiting for this I’d like to thank you for your patience.

It is now possible to upgrade Linux Mint 20.3 to version 21.

The upgrade instructions are available at: https://linuxmint-user-guide.readthedoc ... nt-21.html

https://blog.linuxmint.com/

[Breelander]

...It is now possible to upgrade Linux Mint 20.3 to version 21.

Hmmm, I seem to have been remiss at keeping my Linux Mint VM up to date. I'm much more of a Windows user, with a passing familiarity with Linux.

In Windows I can upgrade direct to the latest version. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't see a way to go directly from 19.1 to 21. I seem to have to go through all the steps between. Currently I'm saying goodbye to Tricia and hello Ulyana....

[GrahamPlatt]

...It is now possible to upgrade Linux Mint 20.3 to version 21.

Hmmm, I seem to have been remiss at keeping my Linux Mint VM up to date. I'm much more of a Windows user, with a passing familiarity with Linux.

In Windows I can upgrade direct to the latest version. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't see a way to go directly from 19.1 to 21. I seem to have to go through all the steps between. Currently I'm saying goodbye to Tricia and hello Ulyana....

You’re not wrong.

[GeoffF100]

I have tried downloading LM 20.3 Cinnamon twice. It failed the integrity check in the same way on both occasions. All my downloads have succeeded on previous occasions, and I have followed exactly the same procedure. I will put up with LM 21 for now.

I have got round the problem with the Firefox window failing to remember its position. The immediate solution was to install Chromium from the Mint repository. Chromium does remember its place. There was a problem, however. Clicking on a search result opened a new tab, and I could not find a setting for changing that. Chromium did have the relevant setting on my Raspberry Pi. The difference was that the Pi had DuckDuckGo as its search engine, whereas LM had Yahoo. Changing the search engine to DuckDuckGo fixed the problem.

I have to say that I am now very happy with LM 21 Cinnamon.

[GeoffF100]

...It is now possible to upgrade Linux Mint 20.3 to version 21.

Hmmm, I seem to have been remiss at keeping my Linux Mint VM up to date. I'm much more of a Windows user, with a passing familiarity with Linux.

In Windows I can upgrade direct to the latest version. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't see a way to go directly from 19.1 to 21. I seem to have to go through all the steps between. Currently I'm saying goodbye to Tricia and hello Ulyana....

You would probably be better of installing LM 21 from scratch. Here is a helpful article on the subject:

https://itsfoss.com/upgrade-linux-mint-version/

However, if you are in Ulyana, do not forget to look at the wallpapers. I am currently using the view over Taipei. Vanessa's wallpapers are not the best in my view. Bing, of course, is a source of very good wallpapers, provided that you do not mind (or edit out) the Microsoft caption.

[Breelander]

You would probably be better of installing LM 21 from scratch. Here is a helpful article on the subject:

https://itsfoss.com/upgrade-linux-mint-version/

However, if you are in Ulyana, do not forget to look at the wallpapers. I am currently using the view over Taipei. Vanessa's wallpapers are not the best in my view.

Thank you, but I waved goodbye to Ulyana too soon to get familiar with her ways. I now have Vanessa here to stay.

I'm actually running my Linux Mint in a Hyper-V VM, so it was easier (from the point of view of configuring Hyper-V) to upgrade than do a clean install.

Bing, of course, is a source of very good wallpapers, provided that you do not mind (or edit out) the Microsoft caption.

Now I can help you with that.

When a Bing background image takes your fancy in Firefox, press Ctrl+I. Click on the Media icon at the top of the Page Info window that pops up. You will see a list of addresses, click on the top one. Now use the keyboard down arrow to move through the list until you find the one for the background image. Copy this address and 'paste and go' it into the address bar of Firefox, it will open the image and you'll be able to download it without any need to edit it.

[Infrasonic]

...I'm actually running my Linux Mint in a Hyper-V VM, so it was easier (from the point of view of configuring Hyper-V) to upgrade than do a clean install...

Out of interest Bree what is your backup/snapshot procedure there with Mint?
I've run Mint in Virtualbox VM's before but never Hyper-V.

As an FYI for anyone who owns a recent Chromebook - you can run Linux VM's other than Debian now. If you have the CPU/RAM horsepower you can even set up multiple Linux VM's using the integrated container facility by turning on the relevant flag in ChromeOS.

Allow multiple Crostini containers
Experimental UI for creating and managing multiple Crostini containers – ChromeOS

#crostini-multi-container

[Breelander]

Out of interest Bree what is your backup/snapshot procedure there with Mint?
I've run Mint in Virtualbox VM's before but never Hyper-V.

My procedure is to disable scheduled snapshots in Mint itself and never make one manually. If I ever need or want to go back I have as many Hyper-V Checkpoints as I need (same thing as VirtualBox's Snapshot). In fact, I was rather annoyed that for Vanessa's mintupgrade it now insisted I had to let it make one before continuing the upgrade (none of the earlier upgrades had done that). I deleted that one as soon as the upgrade had completed.

Similarly, all my Windows VMs have System Protection restore points turned off, but all have at least one Hyper-V checkpoint.

[Breelander]

I have to say that I am now very happy with LM 21 Cinnamon.

I am very impressed with running LM 21 in a Hyper-V VM. It now has much better support for using Hyper-V and its integration services.

The two weaknesses of my previous LM 19.1 were that it could not respond to an operating system shutdown request from the Hyper-V manager, and that at every boot up it warned me that I needed a driver to support Hyper-V's virtual display (not that there was any such driver available).

Both of those are now fully supported by Vanessa, same as they have always been for my Windows VMs.

[servodude]

I have to say that I am now very happy with LM 21 Cinnamon.

I am very impressed with running LM 21 in a Hyper-V VM. It now has much better support for using Hyper-V and its integration services.

The two weaknesses of my previous LM 19.1 were that it could not respond to an operating system shutdown request from the Hyper-V manager, and that at every boot up it warned me that I needed a driver to support Hyper-V's virtual display (not that there was any such driver available).

Both of those are now fully supported by Vanessa, same as they have always been for my Windows VMs.

Interesting

Have you ever compared the behaviour between Hyper-V and VirtualBox?

I'm quite invested in using VirtualBox for development as I found their integration with the likes of USB pass through from the windows host to be pretty seamless; and I use that a lot.

But in the office there's a push to use Hyper-V for a because of some aspect of hardware that's about (or licensing - I confess I'm not sure really)
- and I'm hoping that it isn't really something I need to worry about
Short of maybe having to set up a new VM as a build server if it needs to run in that location rather than trying to clone/port an existing VM.