15 things to do after installing Linux Mint 14 (Nadia) XFCE

Edit 30/12/2013: 12 things to do after installing Linux Mint 16 (Petra) XFCE is now available here.

When I did the last one of these after installing Maya, I got way more traffic to that post than pretty much most of this blog any time ever.

For those of you who are visiting for the first time, I don't actually normally blog about tech stuff.  I blog about politics, religion, consumer affairs, pretty much stuff that is totally un-tech.

But I've just installed Linux Mint 14 (Nadia) XFCE on my little old Eee PC, so enjoy my guide to the first 15 things to do after installation.  Please excuse the liberal copying and pasting from the previous version.

This time, for fun, I did an update to my father's netbook as well.  Things went swimmingly for both and I'm pretty happy with how things turned out.

Fixing the news

It's been a little while since the Finkelstein report came out, and we've since seen the Leveson report come out in the UK.  We've also seen the response to Leveson by the British Prime Minister, David Cameron.

The same thing is pretty much happening here with Finkelstein.  Thanks to articles like this, the hysterical reaction pretty much ensures that any government that wants to enforce standards on the news media will be considered to be recklessly trampling free speech beneath satanic jackboots in an Orwellian orgy of dictatorial facsism by the time that media is finished with them.

I don't support this at all.  Leaving aside regulation for a moment, no one seems to have twigged that the problem is with news itself.  In short, we don't really get it any more.  We get something that looks like news, but is quite slanted and biased and, as I alluded to in my previous posts, we now are getting some pretty second-rate product that we, as consumers, don't really deserve.

In other words, the market is not providing and therefore, there is market failure.  Which, in other industries, means that it's time to regulate.

So, I thought I'd have a good think about this.  What is is that we would like a news service to provide us with?  What is it that we, as consumers, think of when we think of news?

16 Things to do after installing Linux Mint 13 (Maya) XFCE

Edit 30/12/2013: 12 things to do after installing Linux Mint 16 (Petra) XFCE is now available here.

You may have just installed Linux Mint 13 (Maya) XFCE.  What next?

This is a list of stuff I did to get my Eee PC into a state that I can use after installing Mint XFCE.  It might not necessarily work for you, but hey.  It's a kind of sequel of sorts to a post I did earlier today, and again, it's unlikely to appeal to anyone except Linux converts.

One of the things that has struck me about Mint XFCE since I installed it on this machine is its sheer reliability.  XFCE has been around for a little while, now.  While some have regarded it as a bit of a poor man's GNOME, it doesn't have the baggage that GNOME is presently dragging around.

So here are 16 things I did after installing Linux Mint 13 (Maya) XFCE on my Eee PC.

Linux Mint 13 XFCE. Why?

This post is not going to provide any searing insight or anything like that. It's merely a documentary record, for me, if not necessarily anyone else. It's probably only going to appeal to the Linux curios, a diverse group who I can truthfully (and happily) say have completely different ideas about what an operating system should be. So consider yourself warned.

I've just installed LinuxMint 13 (Maya) XFCE onto my aging Eee PC. I have the Eee PC 1008HA Seashell, which is the model (together with the 1008HA) that started ASUS on the path to be a bit more adventurous in their design.

The PC has aged pretty well, although the single core Intel Atom processor and the 1GB of DDR2 RAM hasn't. But after sitting back and watching the bloatware that Ubuntu became with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin), I needed to investigate other options.