I have been running Linux Mint for some time now.

A good friend – Kirk – suggested I try it initially, and I have been using it ever since.

I was talking to Kirk the other night and we got onto the topic of Mint 10 KDE which has been imminent for some time.  He gave me the address from which to download it, which I promptly did.  However, Kirk suggested I just update my existing KDE to 4.6.00, as I only wanted to have a look to see if it was worth switching over from Gnome.  He gave me the address for the software repository ( ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports ) which I duly entered.

That was when the fun began.

I ran a check to see if there were any updates, knowing that there would be some, as I was running and old version of KDE.  It came up with a list of 380 updates!  The following morning, I told it to install the updates, but it refused, saying that I had a broken package.  Unfortunately it didn’t tell me which one. 

I hunted the Internet for a solution to my broken package problem and found several suggestions, none of which worked.  One of the suggestions had been to run Aptitude and supposedly it would at least tell me which package was at fault.  It didn’t but during the process I must have hit a wrong key somewhere because it suddenly announced that it was installing and uninstalling a list of programs.  I don’t know where that came from!

To my disgust, one of the programs that Aptitude removed was Oracle VM VirtualBox which I use a lot.  I tried reinstalling it from Software Manager, but it steadfastly refused.  In the end, I downloaded the package and manually installed it. 

At this stage, I was more or less back where I started, but still was none the wiser about broken packages.  I decided to install updates a block at a time, selecting just twenty updates.  That worked.  The strange thing though was that I worked my way through the entire list of 380, and not one update failed.  Weird?

With all the updates installed, I tried to run KDE by logging out and logging in again.  No go.  For some reason, I was only presented with Gnome as an option.  Back to the drawing board.

I can’t remember the exact details, but my next step was to install KDE 4.6.00 directly from Kubuntu.  That worked.  At last.

KDE 4.6.00 running Windows 7 within VirtualBox

I used KDE for the rest of the day, and it was good.  There were a lot of features I liked, but I won’t be using it.  My distro download (which is now officially released) is tucked away for emergencies, but I won’t be installing it.  Why not?  Partly because I am so used to Gnome at this stage, but mainly because I found KDE to be a lot slower despite this laptop having 4Gb of memory.

Where I would recommend Linux Mint 10 KDE though is for someone who would like to try a Linux distro but is afraid of it being too different from Windows.  KDE 4.6.00 is a lot closer to Windows than Gnome, and would be an excellent introduction to Linux.

I have always considered Linux to be a bit of a geeky system.

I had hoped that with time, the front end would make things simpler, in the same way that Windows more or less made DOS obsolete. That isn’t the case.

The more I have used it, the more I like it. It is extremely fast, solid and also versatile. It is now my default operating system, so all I have to do is switch on the laptop and leave it to boot up. I only have to hover over the keyboard if I want to go into Windows.

In my last post, I mentioned how I was having problems with reinstalling Linux in a virtual file. I still haven’t solved that problem (despite having put an appeal out on the forums), but am developing a couple of theories. One is that apparently a hard disk can only handle four primary partitions? I had never heard this before but it could be the reason for my problem. My hard disk came with three partitions already set up. There is one small one that has an uncertain function. There is another that contains the factory restore code and then there is the main one which is around 320 Gb in size. My first job was to split that into and OS partition and a Data partition, not realising that I had now used up all my four partitions. Some day, I may restore to the factory default and then leave Windows in one partition and Linux in another.

Because I wasn’t able to reinstall, I had to get by by restoring my Linuxmint directory, and that is what I’m working off at the moment. I was also stuck with the size I had originally specified, which was 19Gb. This filled up pretty rapidly leaving me with a setup that lacked flexibility. I hunted the Internet and came up with a solution. Apparently, Linux is able to increase a file size without recreating it. I did say that Linux was flexible?

I tried it out last night and it worked. Or at least it partly worked. This is what I did.

My NTFS Data partition is the one that hold my Linux install. Linux is mounted in a folder called “linuxmint”, in two main files – “root.disk” and “swap.disk”. I can access these files directly from Linux using the path /host/linuxmint/disks/.

Using Terminal as Root I used the following –

cd /host/linuxmint/disks
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=10240 >> root.disk
e2fsck -f root.disk
resize2fs root.disk

The second line is the one that does the main work. It takes a very long time to run, and it is set to increase the size of root.disk by 10Gb. This can be varied by changing the value of “count”.

My problem now is that “root.disk” is 29Gb in size which is exactly what I intended, but when I examine the properties of any directory in Linux, it tells me that the disk size is still only 19Gb. Somehow i have to work out a solution to this little conundrum.

I will say one more thing in favour of Linux –

It certainly keeps an old man’s brain active!