The HP Pavillion dv2000 laptop has been a good one and has held up well over the last few hard years of use. However, since I loaded Ubuntu Lucid Lynx on the IBM I have wanted to try some other Linux flavors, one of those being recently released Linux Mint 10.
The first thing I did was back everything up. I bought a 500GB Goflex external drive by Seagate and moved all of my files (photos, docs, and other things I wanted to keep safe during the install). The 500MB Seagate GoFlex is a pretty cool drive and makes moving files 2 GB in size a cinch. Though I wish it came with some sort of security scheme or password protect option.
I planned on keeping Vista on the machine and just partitioning the hard drive so I could run both Vista and Mint on the same machine. Moving all my personal files off of the HP Laptop and removing unused programs would give me ample space for Linux Mint 10.
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| Linux Mint 10, clean yet inspired. |
I downloaded the Linux Mint 10 ISO (the OS file) on to my machine and then burned it on to a 700MB disc using Infrarecorder (infrarecorder is free program that works great and works for windows). Search Linux Mint 10, and you will find the website with links to different mirrors that you can download it from. Also on the Linux Mint 10 website you will find a PDF guide that serves as a manual, which will guide you through burning the disc and serves as a user guide. Note, as soon as you burn Mint 10 on the disc, you will put it in your drive, then restart the machine. From there on you will go through Mint menus that are easy to navigate.
When you re-boot your machine you will have an option to boot Linux Mint 10 from the disc and go through all of the options (or just run it from the disc and take a test drive without installing it). This is the time where you can partition the drive or just install it over your previous OS. It is really easy to install Linux Mint 10, and it is all done in an elegant fashion.
I have only had Linux Mint 10 running on the HP dv2000 for a day, but so far I am impressed. I have had no issues at all in terms of compatibility between Linux Mint 10 and the HP dv2000 laptop. Everything seems to be working great, though I have not had a chance to see if the HP dv2000 integrated web cam works yet (have to try out Skype in Mint). The Touchpad and mouse work fine as do volume controls on my keyboard that can control Rythmbox.
I did notice that my wireless led light blinks orange and blue while running Mint (so it blinks off and on), strange indeed, but the wireless connection works great anyway. I was able to get on both my home and office networks without a hitch. The web seems much faster with this machine running Mint over Vista (I use the same browser Firefox in both OSs).
If you want to refresh an ageing laptop or try the future of computer operating systems I suggest you try Linux Mint 10 or even Ubuntu and it's latest 10.10 distro.
Linux Mint 10 was a painless install, took only an hour or so, and only cost me one compact disc.
I will update this blog post as I get further acquainted with Linux Mint 10.
*Information contained within these pages do not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of Schreiner University.
Hi there. I liked your post and I just did a similar feat. I had a DV2000 laying around and installed Mint 12 on it. The installation went smoothly with a quirk I never noticed until you mentioned it, the wireless blinking on and off, but I think it's just how the drive interacts with the device. It never really turns off and the performance is uninhibited.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I do have an issue with what I 'thought' was a need to update Adobe Flash.
This problem occurs only (so far at least) when I am on a web page with heavy Flash or Java.
The screen gives a multi-colored fractured look as if a baseball was thrown at the screen. The crazy thing is that it all goes away if I move the curser and when I stop, the problems starts again. I. E. I go to Yahoo the screen freaks out. If I go to Google it's fine.
Hey Michael, I have since installed the latest Ubuntu (11.10) on the HP dv2000 laptop and the wireless light blinks orange and blue like it did with Mint 10 LOL. I am not a fan of the left side bar menu scheme with the latest Ubuntu, so may give Mint 12 a shot (looks nice and clean from screenshots on Mint website). I did not experience the issues you are having with the Flash/Java with Mint 10, but with a quick search it seems that others are having the same issues, hopefully it will get resolved with an upcoming update. Thanks for the comment.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading this article I am about to install Mint on my HP dv2000. I had Fedora 17 which did not have the drivers to support the Broadcom wireless and so I had to find a fix (using fwcutter and some firmware from an opensource website) but during some normal updating this fix broke. There was probably some incompatible software installed. After many hours of frustrating I decided to see if Fedora 18 included the firmware I needed. However, it turns out that Fedora 18 won't run on this machine because it too old (or so I suspect). From this site, it seems that Mint has a work-around and so I will try it. (Blinking light background)
ReplyDelete