A new version of the Software Manager is available in the repository. You can use the Update Manager to upgrade to it.
The Software Manager was rewritten from scratch in Linux Mint 9. It’s a very complex application, and it can be improved in many ways. Today we tackled the time it takes for the application to start. Basically it needs to process some 30,000 packages, a growing number of comments (we’re receiving about 200 comments per day at the moment) and match all that in categories and do some other fancy processing… Because of all this, it’s far from being immediate.
On the machine it’s developed on, during the Linux Mint 9 RC, the Software Manager used to take a rough 10 seconds to start. Improvements were released with the version that came with Linux Mint 9, and the startup was reduced to a rough 5 seconds. Today we managed to further reduce that time to roughly 2 seconds.
Results on various machines:
Of course, 2 seconds on a 4GB RAM Quad-Core workstation isn’t going to be 2 seconds on a 256MB RAM single-core laptop… but the speed improvements will be significant for all of us.
With the help of some of the users in the IRC chat room, we quickly ran the test and got the following results:
Clem:
- 7.1.4: 5224.497 ms
- 7.1.5: 1948.185 ms
- CPU[-Quad core Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 (SMP) clocked at 2399.858 Mhz-] Kernel[-2.6.32-21-generic x86_64-] Up[-1 day-] Mem[-1077.6/3964.8MB-] HDD[-1499.6GB(30.3% used)-] Procs[-202-] Client[-Shell-] inxi[-1.3.2-]
Remington:
- 7.1.4: 5691.338 ms
- 7.1.5: 1767.438 ms
- CPU[-Dual core AMD Athlon 7750 (SMP) clocked at 2700.357 Mhz-] Kernel[-2.6.34-020634-generic x86_64-] Up[-25 min-] Mem[-1002.6/3964.3MB-] HDD[-2078.5GB(79.1% used)-] Procs[-205-] Client[-X-Chat 2.8.6-] inxi[-1.3.2-]
Suhana:
- 7.1.4: 7937.545 ms
- 7.1.5: 3166.507 ms
- CPU[-Single core AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (UP) clocked at 2412.406 Mhz-] Kernel[-2.6.32-21-generic i686-] Up[-5:06-] Mem[-210.1/485.5MB-] HDD[-8.6GB(36.3% used)-] Procs[-135-] Client[-Shell-] inxi[-1.3.2-]
Artz:
- 7.1.4: 12687.454 ms
- 7.1.5: 7655.063 ms
- CPU[-Single core AMD Athlon 64 2800+ (UP) clocked at 1000.000 Mhz-] Kernel[-2.6.32-22-generic x86_64-] Up[-5:20-] Mem[-172.1/494.0MB-] HDD[-80.0GB(27.7% used)-] Procs[-127-] Client[-Shell-] inxi[-1.3.2-]
On your machine:
You can run your current version of the Software Manager from the terminal by typing “mintinstall”, you should see something like that:
add_categories took 1.169 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.189 ms
add_packages took 1862.525 ms
add_reviews took 3111.200 ms
__init__ took 5224.497 ms
The “__init__” line represents the overall startup time in milliseconds. If your reviews are out of date it will call “update_reviews”, if that’s the case, run “minstall” again to get a more accurate measure.
You can then upgrade to the latest version of mintinstall using the Update Manager, and run the test again to see how much faster it is on your computer.
What next?
Well, if you look at Artz’s results, it stills takes him about 8 seconds to start the Startup Manager. This means we’re not finished. Either we’ll manage to further reduce the startup time or we’ll come up with alternative ways of starting the application. Some possibilities include showing the application while the loading is happening in the background (in a way similar to the Update Manager), showing a splash screen before the application, or loading packages one after the other and letting the user browse and use the Software Manager while the applications and comments are still loading…
There’s also concerns with the delay it takes when you click the “install” or “remove” buttons. And finally, there’s a performance issue with clicking on some large categories, especially the “All packages” category, which features more than 30,000 packages. We might use paging for this or lazy-loading techniques.
Note about a regression in this update:
This update also removes the “Other” category and renames the previously called “System packages” to “All packages”. This last string is new, and it isn’t translated yet, so it will appear in English for all users. The translation template was updated in Launchpad and we’ll update the mint-translations package to fix this issue as soon as translations for this new string are made available by the community.
add_categories took 1.591 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.199 ms
add_packages took 8896.644 ms
add_reviews took 102.748 ms
__init__ took 9907.192 ms
Unfortunately I updated before I could test the previous speed. I do believe it was faster tho
I will test it again later when I’m not running MintBackup, 2 IRC’s and 10 Firefox Tabs.
Yes noticed that update today, Thank you, It looks tidier, Here is my results on a dual core Intel Celeron E1500 @ 2.20 GHZ… with 2GB ram… Kernel 2.6.32-21.Generic… x86.
Don’t know my previous results before this update sorry.
add_categories took 3.257 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.363 ms
add_packages took 3213.629 ms
add_reviews took 155.196 ms
__init__ took 3532.393 ms
And here’s another one taken when Firefox was closed and nothing running..
add_categories took 2.000 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.275 ms
add_packages took 2445.788 ms
add_reviews took 156.375 ms
__init__ took 2762.588 ms
Unfortunately I read this after doing the update but never mind; having used the Update Manager yesterday I can safely say that the new version is MUCH quicker
add_categories took 2.131 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.289 ms
add_packages took 2583.208 ms
add_reviews took 60.575 ms
__init__ took 2839.589 ms
Hi, under sudo it ends with SEGFAULT.
jok@mintka ~ $ sudo mintinstall
add_categories took 1.680 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.256 ms
add_packages took 2957.385 ms
add_reviews took 166.905 ms
__init__ took 3567.980 ms
Segmentation fault
fabio@fabio-laptop ~ $ mintinstall
add_categories took 2.293 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.424 ms
add_packages took 2941.477 ms
add_reviews took 3365.750 ms
__init__ took 6519.410 ms
fabio@fabio-laptop ~ $ mintinstall
add_categories took 1.973 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.338 ms
add_packages took 2353.110 ms
add_reviews took 43.811 ms
__init__ took 2607.761 ms
speed up of about 4 second, really good!
Previous:
add_categories took 1.883 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.387 ms
add_packages took 2132.912 ms
add_reviews took 1892.519 ms
__init__ took 5890.165 ms
NOW:
add_categories took 1.047 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.211 ms
add_packages took 1577.124 ms
add_reviews took 134.285 ms
__init__ took 1787.457 ms
* Romanian translation updated.
[7.1.4] try #1: 7662.620 ms
[7.1.4] try #2: 6024.640 ms (a few seconds later)
[7.1.5] try #1: 2719.641 ms
[7.1.5] try #2: 2456.295 ms (a few seconds later)
All these improvements are excellent however it is unlikely Mint 9 will ever reach its full potential due to it being based on the awful Ubuntu Lucid 🙁
I can certainly see the improvement on my PC. How about adding a PPA category?
Cheer up, Guy! Helena sat on a worse build of Ubuntu and it still performed very well. Have you tried Isadora yet? 🙂 It’s not perfect, obviously, but it’s very nice. 🙂 I wouldn’t use anything else and I’m an old distro-hopper.
Wow nice improvement on my Aspire Revo, 18 seconds -> just under 8 seconds. And this is my first day using Mint.
Oops, didn’t see the bit about running with the old version first! Anyway, as for 7.1.5…
RUN 1:
add_categories: 2.606 ms
build_matched_packages: 0.364 ms
add_packages: 3130.982 ms
add_reviews: 39.524 ms
__init__: 4873.297 ms
update_reviews: 95.964 ms
RUN 2:
add_categories: 2.371 ms
build_matched_packages: 0.364 ms
add_packages: 3389.358 ms
add_reviews: 68.073 ms
__init__: 4136.976 ms
update_reviews: 52.061 ms
CPU: Intel Core2Duo T3200 @ 1,33 GHz (2 GHz at full speed, reduced due to powersaving measures – laptop)
Kernel: 2.6.32-22-generic x86_64
Up: 9 min
Mem: 1448.9/2888.0 Mb
Before and after
add_categories took 25.534 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.990 ms
add_packages took 3841.061 ms
add_reviews took 5899.321 ms
__init__ took 10786.938 ms
Overwriting reviews file in /home/jonneyboy/.linuxmint/mintinstall/reviews.list
update_reviews took 6837.630 ms
add_categories took 2.413 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.433 ms
add_packages took 3851.292 ms
add_reviews took 6656.887 ms
__init__ took 10781.494 ms
add_categories took 2.460 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.430 ms
add_packages took 3088.779 ms
add_reviews took 297.702 ms
__init__ took 3655.520 ms
On an IBM X31 2GB Ram and Intel Celeron 1.4
I just wanted to say that you guys are doing a wonderful job with this distro. IMO Linux Mint has become a rather distinguished distro over the years (in any case when compared to other Ubuntu derivatives). For example these Mint tools sure are very handy and innovative and it’s nice to see them being recognised by other major distros such as, recently, Fedora (well, at least the Remix part).
Keep up the good job.
From 8 seconds to 3. works for me
add_categories took 28.687 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.586 ms
add_packages took 6134.920 ms
add_reviews took 0.104 ms
__init__ took 7873.558 ms
Overwriting reviews file in /home/talishte/.linuxmint/mintinstall/reviews.list
update_reviews took 6752.522 ms
add_categories took 3.319 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.512 ms
add_packages took 6782.546 ms
add_reviews took 6600.534 ms
__init__ took 13624.517 ms
Linux talishte-desktop 2.6.32-22-generic-pae #33-Ubuntu SMP Wed Apr 28 14:57:29 UTC 2010 i686 GNU/Linux
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1414064 1271228 142836 0 81672 792400
-/+ buffers/cache: 397156 1016908
@ kneekoo
I have installed Isadora on 3 different machines and my conclusion is based on my experiences with those installations. I realize it is not the fault of Mint in itself but with Ubuntu Lucid with which I am also disappointed with and the issues I had with it have been inherited by Isadora.
I would like to add I have been using Mint since 3.0 Cassandra and this is the first time I have had reason to complain
If my comments seem as though I am being ungrateful then I apologize. Its just for me Isadora is a massive disappointment, but as I say that is not the fault of Mint itself
__init__ took 4172.223 ms
Overwriting reviews file in /home/seventh/.linuxmint/mintinstall/reviews.list
update_reviews took 47.974 ms
After exiting and running again:
__init__ took 3936.908 ms
4 seconds. Me Likey 🙂
and for the record, I actually believe Ubuntu 9.10 was their best release. The only release so far (for me) that had zero bugs.
10.04 has so many bugs I gave up counting them.
Here is my output for 7.1.5
add_categories took 0.991 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.156 ms
add_packages took 1203.342 ms
add_reviews took 118.301 ms
__init__ took 1561.890 ms
CPU:Dual core Intel Core2 Duo E6850 (SMP) cache 4096 KB flags (sse3 nx lm vmx)
Clock Speeds: (1) 3003.00 MHz (2) 2003.00 MHz
I think this is a descent time 😉
From 8 seconds down to 2! Great work 🙂
@Guy: I didn’t know that. Isadora could be better for me as well. I still can’t get decent graphics (ATI nasty drivers) and my hybrid TV tuner doesn’t work, so I also have my share of discomfort with the current version. But the overall result is still very good so I keep hoping for the better. I use Mint since Celena and I got used to the way the developers take care of the distro, but your doubt could become true. Once released, the distros mainly get significant updates for the Mint tools, which are the only ones the Mint devs can actually improve significantly. I just hope we will see improvements in these small areas.
The Swedish translation is now done.
Here are my results
7.1.4: __init__ took 8682.233 ms
7.1.5: __init__ took 3454.602 ms
intel ULV7300 @1.3GHz 4Gb DDR3 ram.
This is a massive improvement! 3.5 secs is still a long time to load, but compared with 8-9, this is awsome!
that’s not the point but, oh, i always used synaptic instead.
nice job anyway.
add_categories took 6.938 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.300 ms
add_packages took 2980.879 ms
add_reviews took 0.058 ms
__init__ took 4300.574 ms
Overwriting reviews file in /home/andrew/.linuxmint/mintinstall/reviews.list
update_reviews took 5708.138 ms
Why ubuntu didnt build on your software manager? it seems they started from scratch. When you heard they start from scratch you should have offfered whatever help they need.
Why dont you rebase your software manager upon ubuntu code. why you seem to run parallel software manager code? it is easier if you build upon ubuntu code.
2nd run of 7.1.4:
arlos@arlos-m9x64-lap ~ $ mintinstall
add_categories took 1.157 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.197 ms
add_packages took 1941.564 ms
add_reviews took 3742.291 ms
__init__ took 5795.067 ms
After 7.1.5 install and the other 20 updates:
arlos@arlos-m9x64-lap ~ $ mintinstall
add_categories took 1.162 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.197 ms
add_packages took 1571.687 ms
add_reviews took 162.018 ms
__init__ took 1843.040 ms
I tried running it multiple times in a row, and always had added reviews, but realistically I’m not going to run it, shut it down, and then restartit to see how fast it is. I’ll start it once and use it, that will be the real life scenario.
5795ms down to 1843. Very impressive. Can you work on speeding Window XP up for me as well :)…just kidding, when I’m using the FASTER computers at school, I get impatient waiting for them to load any program. Then I remember it isn’t running Linux. I hadn’t noticed the update manager being slow before the update, but I eventually plan on making a project machine out of an old Dell CPi D300XT laptop, and I bet I’d notice it there.
My machine:
Mint 9 x64
Dell Latitude D820
Core 2 Duo T7600 2.33
3.2 usable of 4GB physically installed ram (northbridge restriction)
120GB OCZ Apex SSD…minimal tweaking for optimization since 9 fresh install
Mint 8 Helena
That’s THIS ONE of my 2 computers (desks) and 2 laptops (one older Lap
saved for Debian Lenny)
AMD x64 Dual Core Athlon 2.0Ghz 4Gb Ram
OK. I downloaded mintInstall .deb v 7.5.1 from (9) Isadora’s repo and installed
mintInstall on Mint 8 Helena x64. It works good (Only All Packages category
freezes – not ready yet i suppose)
rob@rob-desktop ~ $ mintinstall
add_categories took 2.209 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.225 ms
add_packages took 2323.277 ms
add_reviews took 45.097 ms
__init__ took 6421.404 ms
rob@rob-desktop ~ $
rob@rob-desktop ~ $ inxi -F
System: Host rob-desktop Kernel 2.6.31-14-generic x86_64 (64 bit) Distro Linux Mint 8 Helena – x64 Edition
CPU: Dual core AMD Athlon 4050e (SMP) cache 1024 KB flags (sse3 nx lm svm) bmips 4018.6
Clock Speeds: (1) 1000.00 MHz (2) 1000.00 MHz
Graphics: Card nVidia G98 [GeForce 8400 GS] X.Org 1.6.4 Res: 1366×768@50.0hz
GLX Renderer GeForce 8400 GS/PCI/SSE2 GLX Version 3.0.0 NVIDIA 185.18.36 Direct Rendering Yes
Audio: Card nVidia MCP61 High Definition Audio driver HDA Intel
Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Version 1.0.20
Network: Card nVidia MCP61 Ethernet driver forcedeth at port ec00
Disks: HDD Total Size: 324.1GB (4.6% used) 1: /dev/sda WDC WD3200AAJS-0 320.1GB
2: USB /dev/sdb DataTraveler 2.0 4.0GB
Partition: ID:/ size: 50G used: 12G (25%) fs: ext4 ID:swap-1 size: 11.00GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap
Info: Processes 152 Uptime 12 min Memory 419.1/3018.6MB Client Shell inxi 1.2.6
rob@rob-desktop ~ $
cheers
Before upgrade:
mint@mint ~ $ mintinstall
add_categories took 3.345 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.412 ms
add_packages took 6618.603 ms
add_reviews took 5872.217 ms
__init__ took 12808.191 ms
After upgrade:
mint@mint ~ $ mintinstall
add_categories took 3.266 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.402 ms
add_packages took 4797.939 ms
add_reviews took 259.068 ms
__init__ took 5418.342 ms
From almost 13 sec to ~5.5 sec – quite impressive!
System: Intel Celeron CPU 2.66 GHz, 1 GB RAM
Not that I’m too surprised, but I noticed Software Manager doesn’t take advantage of multiple processor cores. On my laptop (http://www.dse.com.au/cgi-bin/dse.storefront/en/product/XC6469) a random CPU thread would max out it’s processing, while the other three were largely unaffected.
Not that I’m too surprised, but I noticed Software Manager doesn’t take advantage of multiple processor cores. On my laptop (http://www.dse.com.au/cgi-bin/dse.storefront/en/product/XC6469) a random CPU thread would max out it’s processing, while the other three were largely unaffected. SM would consistently take about three seconds to start on each test.
On an under-clocked E5200 dual core rig (We’ve had a heatwave)
(but with a 9Mbps Internet connection)
Before – init took 5467.419 ms
After – init took 1809.055 ms
A Useful improvement, Isadora just keeps getting better !
WOW! spectacular! it’s gone down from 14,3 sec. to 4.3 sec.
Great improvement.
Tks
At home I had v7.1.5 installed when I got home… probably updated this morning before I went to work… I don’t know. 🙂
[7.1.5] try #1: 3586.404 ms
[7.1.5] try #2: 3484.965 ms (segmentation fault on close, displayed in terminal – I pushed the close button before it fully loaded)
[7.1.5] try #3: 3546.331 ms
[7.1.5] try #4: 3529.901 ms
CPU[-Dual core Intel Core2 6320 (SMP) clocked at 1596.000 Mhz-] Kernel[-2.6.32-22-generic i686-] Up[-7 days-] Mem[-580.1/2010.7MB-] HDD[-750.2GB(8.3% used)-] Procs[-185-] Client[-Shell-] inxi[-1.3.2-]
So the average startup time for me is 3.5 seconds. It doesn’t bother me, really, but if there’s still room for improvement, we’re here, waiting for the updates. 🙂
I haven’t upgraded to LM9 yet so I do not know a lot about this issue, but wouldn’t it be a good idea start a background daemon together with MintUpdate? That way the software manager will show faster when you click its launcher. Of course this would take some extra memory, but I guess that could be minimised if MintInstall and MintUpdate are more integrated with each other.
In any case it would be wise for the background daemon to wait for MintUpdate to start so it doesn’t considerably slow down the login.
It is much quicker, good job!. One feature I do miss in the new format is the “featured programs” menu. I think it would be fantastic if it is implemented again in the new format. What do you think, Clem?
Manny: There’s a “featured” category for this exact reason.
Fr3d: It’s an “n” complexity for the comments, so it’s not an issue anymore. We can have many more comments, it won’t slow down the application. At the moment we’re getting 200+ comments a day… with 7.1.4 there was a complexity of n2 and that was a worry. This worry is gone now. 7.1.5 addresses that.
Isadora is a smashing release. Personally I think the Software Manager is OK now you have improved it. Its perhaps a tiny bit slow and will get heaver with more comments but I like it for the moment.
Verix suggested a PPA section. I’m sure this its a potentially messy can of worms but http://ubuntu-tweak.com/ sets an interesting example in many aspects. Just no search tool!!
OMG Clem has the same CPU as me 😀
and same amount of ram…
and HDD space…..
lol this is scary
first run:
add_categories took 32.254 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.705 ms
add_packages took 2952.565 ms
add_reviews took 353.492 ms
__init__ took 6060.599 ms
second run:
add_categories took 1.692 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.312 ms
add_packages took 3004.600 ms
add_reviews took 251.100 ms
__init__ took 3469.741 ms
I think mintInstall could only limit to 5 or maximum 10 comments for each software, then add a link to the website, where all the comments are available. This would keep the application in a shorter leash, so it can actually perform in a decent manner for everyone.
The other option would be pagination, of course. But that’s trickier so I’m not sure if it’s worth the pain.
LINUX MINT 9 ISADORA-x64bit Machine AMD64 Athlon dual core 2ghz 4gb ram
rob@arob-desktop:~$ mintinstall
add_categories took 1.755 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.213 ms
add_packages took 2340.451 ms
add_reviews took 233.231 ms
__init__ took 3453.909 ms
I just discovered a bug in the latest mintInstall version. Try multi-clicking on any category/software/screenshot/link. And by multi-clicking I meant clicking rapidly, just as we double-click. I discovered this by accident, but it shouldn’t happen.
did you guys reconfigure how the database was structured and loaded? I’d be rather interested in what you did
SxFlare: No, the improvements are mostly related to avoiding sequential searches on the 30,000 packages. Each comment was looking for a matching package… that’s the 10 sec… then we broke out of the loop and remembered the last used package (comments being sorted by packages in the file we receive from the server).. that’s the 5 sec… now we’re putting packages in a mapping structure and we access them directly using their name as key. Changes to the code are illustrated there: http://github.com/linuxmint/mintinstall/commits/master (the two commits from 28-05-10).
Sorry Clem, I installed the OS using the catalan package this time and of course there is the “featured” menu under “destacat” as it should be. Oh boy, I got confused….hahahaha.
Any way, I like the tool and I have been using it instead of Synaptic and it works great. thank you very much!!!
Processor: 2x Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual CPU E2200 @ 2.20GHz
Memory : 3096MB
—————-
Before:
add_categories took 27.630 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.480 ms
add_packages took 2449.962 ms
add_reviews took 0.100 ms
__init__ took 3921.741 ms
—————-
After:
add_categories took 2.534 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.474 ms
add_packages took 1980.640 ms
add_reviews took 150.887 ms
__init__ took 2309.725 ms
—————-
Speed: 1612.016
Thanks Clem 🙂
I tried to click a billion times like kneekoo said above, and mintinstall just kept opening tabs and screenshots. I guess that’s the bug he’s talking about 🙂
yesterday i also found out that mintinstall would freeze when accessing some websites. Wouldn’t it be better if it just launched firefox instead?
Prawnsushi: I guess we could have an option for that. I like to browse inside the app, but I can understand some people might prefer to use Firefox.
Clem : Thanks 🙂 Actually i thought about making it an option would be nicer. I like to browse inside mintinstall too, but if it freezes during an install, it can be nasty :\
Clem: I’m not very versed in python so can’t really do much with reading the code yet.
However, that’s a good way to do it, the methods and ways described for accessing the packages and such are similar to a web application database access. The improvement is clearly noticeable.
It could be possible to improve the loading slightly more (or at least improve display on the application page) with paging the reviews, I’m not sure how you could do that, since I’ve only done paging with hardcoding it in to the programs which may take a bit of portability out of MintInstall.
My resutls:
Before:
add_categories took 20.730 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.320 ms
add_packages took 2793.697 ms
add_reviews took 2630.615 ms
__init__ took 6772.159 ms
After:
add_categories took 1.800 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.310 ms
add_packages took 2327.116 ms
add_reviews took 171.276 ms
__init__ took 2684.439 ms
My results on an Intel Dual Core2 T5500 @ 1.66GHz, 2.5GiB of RAM:
[7.1.4]__init__ took 8741.507 ms
[7.1.5]__init__ took 2994.687 ms
Delta = 5746.82 ms faster … Wow! :]
Before:
add_categories took 1.707 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.341 ms
add_packages took 2495.576 ms
add_reviews took 3654.029 ms
__init__ took 6430.010 ms
After:
add_categories took 1.519 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.286 ms
add_packages took 2050.151 ms
add_reviews took 41.776 ms
__init__ took 2385.959 ms
Well done.
I for one am very disappointed with 9 final. I had no issues with the RC, but had many with the final product. I have since re-installed RC and will stay there or may even go back to 8.
Mint has always been my safe haven so to speak, but this old fart is no longer as dedicated to it as he once was.
I may do an update of RC in a couple weeks to see if my issues are gone.
Some may tell me: Well goto the forums and post about the issues. I would, but that would be a very long post indeed.
One issue that total bugs the Hell outta this old fart, is firefox will not close out no matter what I do. I would have to do a restart of the pc to close it out.
I have reinstalled it so many times, but the problem persists. I even removed as many dependencies as I could, which broke the install twice. So I gave up.
It’s been a great ride since Mint 5 folks, but this old fart may just be taking the next bus back to Distro Hopping Land.
I haven’t tried Mint yet, but I can tell you that doing the automated update from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 killed-my-laptop (An older Dell P4) that 9.10 was running extremely well on. 10.04 takes Ubuntu uncomfortably close to Windows. Unusably close.
Don’t follow Ubuntu too close unless you want to hit the same potholes they do.
If 10.04 is going to have hardware issues with a computer, it needs to check for these and decline to upgrade. Better to say “sorry, your hardware won’t cut it” than to say “oops … sorry about that — wanna a free CD?”
Oddly enough, 9.10 offered to dual boot with 10.04, but the bootloader screen doesn’t show anything for 10.04. Soooo … one more install (pure 9.10) to reclaim the disk space (I’ve become a Windows wimp and don’t trust my partd skills).
don’t have the before results, but it was around 4 seconds so it’s much quicker.
jonathan@jonathan ~ $ mintinstall
add_categories took 0.723 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.109 ms
add_packages took 1061.239 ms
add_reviews took 116.358 ms
__init__ took 1246.975 ms
CPU – AMD Phenom II X4 965@3612.90MHz
Mem – 1329/8003MB@1066MHz
Kernel – 2.6.32-21-generic x86_64
Procs – 220
Up – 2:35
ikey@ikey-laptop ~/Desktop $ mintinstall
add_categories took 2.648 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.495 ms
add_packages took 4805.201 ms
add_reviews took 71.836 ms
__init__ took 5107.896 ms
ikey@ikey-laptop ~/Desktop $ inxi
CPU[-Dual core Celeron T3100 (SMP) clocked at 1895.379 Mhz-] Kernel[-2.6.32-21-generic i686-] Up[-11 min-] Mem[-529.3/1979.4MB-] HDD[-320.1GB(2.0% used)-] Procs[-169-] Client[-Shell-] inxi[-1.4.9-]
ikey@ikey-laptop ~/Desktop $
A lot better than the previous version on my 1.6Ghz Pentium M, that
took 24 seconds lol
@FrogDemon: This is about an operating system, not just some software. This stuff just happens every once in a while. The Mint developers can’t foresee every issue on every hardware, so they depend on user feedback. If you like Linux Mint and you would like to use it further, write your problems in the forum and the solutions might just appear from one user or another.
In the meantime, you could also use Helena for another month, until the bugs gets fixed. But your safest bet is still to report any issues, so the developers know about it. They won’t fix themselves, that’s for sure.
@kneekoo: I am back on RC and will stay there at least a month, the I will update. I am sure the kinks will be ironed out by then. If not, I will reinstall Helena.
Abut as others have said, the parent OS is the issue. If Mint would goto Debian, then we wouldn’t inherit Ubuntu’s issues.
@FrogDemon: Very likely about the Ubuntu flaws. But then I wonder if so many other things would just work out of the box. Only time will tell, if the Mint developers will give a serious shot at trying a Debian spin. I would definitely love that.
Ubuntu is a serious player in the OS world but its management needs to pay more attention to what the world is saying. Sometimes I have the feeling they are locked down with no internet access and noone reports them what’s going on, because some of their decisions are quite strange.
Their decisions are based on business “affiliations” at the present. But I thought about making a Debian spin of Mint myself, however, I don’t know enough to do so.
I am also working on a Mint LXDE x64 at present and coming across several issues with it.
add_categories took 13.571 ms
build_matched_packages took 0.711 ms
add_packages took 23386.276 ms
add_reviews took 1115.024 ms
__init__ took 25463.212 ms
FrogDemon : Mint LXDE x64 would be welcomed here 🙂 I installed LXDE on every x64 distro that i used…
@2noob2banoob
No it would not be a good idea to start mintInstall as a deamon. This is because the installer is rarely used, as of has no need to be allocated into your “used” RAM. But if you have enough RAM, and especially if you use preload, the Linux kernel will automaticly buffer applications and resources into your unnused RAM so that it can be quickly accessed when you need it.
It very much probable that your whole RAM is consumed now by three different classes of memory, used, buffers and cache.