Well it's review time again and today's candidate is Linux Mint 5. I say today's candidate but really I should say this months candidate as I ended up spending a lot more time on Mint than I'd planned. I really liked Mint 4 and gave it a rave review last year, so this new version would have to work hard to impress me, after 3 weeks with it on and off how does it stack up? Here goes...

Installation:
As usual I tested out this distro using my main machine, a Dell XPS m1330 notebook I bought with Ubuntu. Linux Mint is essentially a modification of Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron with added codecs and tools, so I didn't anticipate any problems. A lot of people dismiss Mint as just "Ubuntu with codecs" or as some kind of gimmick, I was even guilty of this same attitude myself in the past but Mint 4 proved me wrong. There's a few different versions of Mint available these days with KDE desktop, XFCE and even a Debian based alternative. I downloaded the standard Gnome LiveCD and got to work installing it.

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