I have made no secret here of my love for Mint. In the pantheon of Linux distros (and that is a huge pantheon full of worthies), it is the one that just works for me more than any other that I have tried. So I took the opportunity to install the new Mint 5 Revision 1 to the Dell laptop.

Since I was planning on keeping XP, and it had a ton of tools installed, I needed to set aside 30 GB of the hard drive for XP. I know: Seems like alot, but those tools look pretty useful, and the hard drive is big enough for both Linux and a 30 GB MSWin partition at 80GB.

First off, I ran XP's hard drive optimization program to make sure everything was compacted together, and I also ran chkdisk, just to be sure the hard drive looked healthy. Then I booted up Mint 5r1 and went through the very familiar install sequence.

5r1 does not do anything to the time zone picker (The graphical view of the Earth that slips and slides around under the mouse) to make it better. Still easier just to pick the TZ off the menu than to use the graphical selector. A case of a bad use of a graphical interface if there ever was one.

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