Western Digital has announced a "new" series of hard drives specifically rated for NAS, (Network Attached Storage), devices called "Red" drives. (See the WD product page here.) Micro Center has begun selling them, and you can see the web-site ad for them here. At $114 for a 2 Tb, 7200 rpm, 64 meg cache, 6 Gb/second drive, the price is also reasonable compared to other "advanced" drives - and should come down.
As these gain traction, you can expect other manufacturers to follow suit with their own "NAS" rated drives.
The addition of a new "color" to the current hard drive rainbow is not surprising. However, the current cacophony of hard drive types, names, colors, and designations can be confusing - so this article hopes to sort some of this confusion into a reasonable order.
Seagate has their Barracuda, Momentus, (etc.), and just plain-vanilla branded hard drives.
Western Digital also has their "vanilla" branded drive, as well as the Green, Black, Blue, "Caviar," "Scorpio," and now their new "Red" drives.
Up until now, the differentiating factor among all these consumer level drives has been power consumption, speed, (including cache size and rpm rating), and retail price-point.
All of these drives, (except for the Red drive), have one thing in common: They are designed for use in personal computer applications; either desktop, laptop, tablet, netbook, or some other consumer computer product.
In contrast, the new Western Digital "Red" drives are designed to compete with higher-priced Enterprise class drives - at least the Enterprise class SATA drives - in array or RAID configurations, at a much lower price-per-unit.
Hard drives come in two basic flavors: Consumer drives, intended for the personal computer application, and Enterprise drives that are intended for heavy-duty array based usage.
So, what's the difference? (Besides the fact that "Enterprise" class drive can be hugely expensive!)
Basically, it's the firmware loaded into the drive. (At least in the SATA based drives. Fiber-channel, and other advanced interface technologies are a Horse of a Different Hue altogether.)
Consumer level drives have firmware that assumes that the drive is in an application with little to zero redundancy.
As a consequence, if the drive has trouble reading a sector/cluster on the platter it vigorously attempts to read - and recover - the data, which can take extended amounts of time. And this is reasonable. With one, (or at most a few), drives in the system, each one being independent of the others, reading the data - come hell or high water - is of paramount importance.
Enterprise level drive firmware takes an entirely different approach.
Enterprise drive firmware assumes that the drive is in an array or other type of RAID arrangement where data integrity is handled externally to each individual drive - via hardware error recovery, parity, or whatever. And as a consequence, the firmware on an Enterprise level drive is designed to be less anal about digging for the data.
In other words, it gives up and returns a "data fail" message sooner, (in some cases much sooner), the emphasis being on data throughput speed. Since there are other drives, or hardware, to handle the, (hopefully!), occasional data error issue, the drive isn't so eager to dig for data.
Additionally - at least in some cases - the drive's reliability and warranty is more highly rated. (Though there is a white-paper released by Google that claims that the MTBF and speed of the Enterprise level SATA drive is often no better than that of their consumer level counterparts. Despite their greatly advanced prices.)
So, what does this mean to you?
If you are using the drive in a NAS device, where there is some kind of data-recovery mechanism involved, the new NAS rated drives might be the best choice.
Though be careful. If you have a multiple-drive NAS device where the drives are arranged in a RAID-1, RAID-0 or Linear arrangement, (where there is simple mirroring, or all the drives are combined together as one huge drive),"red" drives are not for you, as you still need the built-in aggressive error recovery of the normal consumer rated drive.
Likewise, in a single, (or group of independent drives), arrangement - the NAS rated devices are not the best choice. If it's performance you want in an independent drive scenario, it's better to spend your money on the performance rated drives.
The big telling point is this:
How important is the ability to recover data on an individual drive? If there is no external redundancy, then it's absolutely critical. Otherwise the NAS rated drives might be a better choice.
Note: No matter how aggressive the error recovery may be, or how advanced the RAID technology, there is no substitute for regular backups.
What say ye?
Jim (JR)
(Stupid Disclaimer: The names and other descriptive attributes of the drives and manufacturers mentioned above may well be trademarks belonging to their respective manufacturers.)
Saturday, March 9, 2013
Sunday, February 24, 2013
OOPS! - When disaster strikes
System Backups (Part 2 of a series)
In my previous article in this series - OOPS! - When disaster strikes (System Restore) - I discussed the importance of the System Restore functionality that has been included in Windows since Windows XP, and how it can save your butt big-time. This particular "safety net" is easy to implement, and easier to use, since it is essentially automatic once enabled.
System Restore, as good as it is, can't save you if the problem is more drastic. For example, a hard drive crash; or when malware, (or a poorly written piece of software), wanders willy-nilly over your hard drive leaving a trail of dead or wounded disk clusters in it's wake. In the case where the physical or logical integrity of your storage media has been damaged or destroyed, System Restore cannot help you.
In the same vein, System Restore cannot help you if you're brain-dead at the wheel and "accidentally" permanently delete your one-and-only draft of your Doctoral Thesis, some other document, file, or whatever that is similarly valuable and irreplaceable.
In this kind of situation, what you need is a backup.
Backups come in a whole host of shapes, sizes, colors and flavors, depending on what you need; ranging from something as simple as copying cherished family photos to a CD, to something as difficult as managing the backup methodology for Wikipedia's online databases and file servers to ensure data consistency.
If a particular file, or files, are important, you should invest time into making periodic copies of the data while it's evolving. In the case of program source files, or important document files that are subject to continuing edits, some kind of version control system could be vitally important as well.
However, in many cases what we want to preserve, and possibly restore, is the entire state of a particular computer system at a given point in time.
There are two basic methods for making these kinds of system backups:
Bare-metal Backups:
The easiest way to backup a system is via a complete system image, otherwise known as a "bare-metal" backup.
A bare-metal backup is one that takes an existing, known working, system and makes a literal, (clone), image of it, byte-for-byte, that can be used to re-create the exact same system on different hardware at some future time if need be. In other words, you can recreate the imaged system on "bare-metal" - that is a system that does not have a working operating system installed yet.
Example:
You have a computer that has Windows 7 on it, and it's working wonderfully. At some point in time, you decide you want to upgrade the system to Windows 8 by doing an in-place upgrade rather than re-installing the entire O/S from scratch. And. . . Though you are confident that the engineers and programmers at Microsoft have done a wonderfully thorough job of making sure the upgrade is painless, you want to be able to restore the original system if your upgrade experience is somewhat less than stellar.
In situations like this, bare-metal backups are the best way to preserve the system as it was prior to the upgrade.
Obviously, a literal byte-for-byte image of a three terabyte hard drive would be huge
Fortunately, modern system imaging software handles this problem using a two-pronged approach.
The disadvantages are more subtle: Unless your filesystem is absolutely pristine - totally consistent [1] [2] with no errors whatsoever - the image created may look more like Frankenstein's Monster, than a usable filesystem. Fortunately, most disk cloning software is particularly paranoid when it comes to file system integrity, and will stubbornly refuse to go any further if it sees anything out of the ordinary.
Theoretically, (and that really should be in quotation marks!), all cloning software should support most, if not all, modern filesystems. Despite the claims of some disk imaging software, I prefer to use the Windows based software for imaging Windows drives and Linux based software for imaging Linux drives.
My two favorites are:
Both Acronis True Image and Clonezilla can be used as "live CD's", meaning that you can boot the system from the CD and take an image of the entire filesystem while it is at rest. (IMHO, the best way to obtain a completely consistent system image.)
The advantage of taking an image while the system is not running is obvious: The filesystem is static so there is no chance of any changes taking place while the backup is being taken. Because the filesystem is static, the image created is an exact copy of the system state at that point in time. This can be useful when disinfecting a drive, or doing data recovery.
The disadvantage of a system like this is the same as its advantage: The filesystem must not be running.
In other words, the system must be stopped, the backup taken, (which can take non-trivial amounts of time depending on the size of the disks and the amount of the disk that is being used), and then the system must be re-started. Obviously, while the backup is being performed, the system is not available for use. Equally obvious is that systems which must be on-line 24/7 cannot tolerate this kind of "cold system" backup and it's associated downtime.
Likewise, most bare-metal backup software will not restore an image to a hard drive smaller than the original, even if most of the space on the drive is unused. Depending on the software being used, this can be mitigated by shrinking the partitions to the smallest size possible prior to making the backup, and then re-expanding them to the size of the hard drive they're installed on after the restore is finished.
Another potential disadvantage is that - in some cases - the image is atomic in and of itself, so that it is not possible to extract parts of the image, (particular files, for example), without restoring the entire image.
Luckily this is not universally true, and some of the better backup software allow the created images to be explored, and portions extracted, as if they were just one big zip file.
Snapshot Backups:
Snapshot backups are a little bit different than a bare-metal backup.
Snapshot backups are frozen-in-time copies of the state of a machine, taken while the machine is running.
There are various ways of taking snapshots[1] [2], however the method used by VMware is illustrative.
Restoring to a particular snapshot point-in-time is essentially the reverse of the above procedure.
Snapshot backups have some interesting advantages:
Snapshot backups have their disadvantages too:
The subject of backups is a complex one, as even a cursory on-line reading of the subject will show. The various backup methods have their individual supporters, and discussions about which backup method is best is akin to the religious wars during the Middle Ages.
Unfortunately, there is really no "one-size-fits-all" solution for backups, as it depends on what your individual requirements are, how much storage you can afford, and how much risk you are willing to take.
Update:
Bennette, in his comment below, pointed out that I had actually left out a good chunk of the "backup" process, and that is actually verifying that the backups are worth a damn. I have seen large and tech-savvy companies get their lunch eaten because they grew complacent about their backups.
An ISP provider that I used to use got trapped this way. They had a really fancy striped RAID-5+1 setup on their servers. . . And with all that redundancy, backups aren't really that important, right?
Good 'Ole Mr. Murphy steps in one night when everyone else is asleep at the wheel and introduces just a teeny, tiny bit of corruption. And, not unlike the Fabergé shampoo commercial, it corrupted two things, and they corrupted two more things, and. . . Well you get the picture. Many weeks, huge gobs of money, and a tremendous hit to their customer good-will later - they finally got everything back up and running.
I have had this happen to me as well. I learned my lesson awhile ago when I had a nice RAID-1 array go south on me - and there I am thinking about how clever I am with my (ahem!) "bulletproof" RAID with it's "built-in backup". Right?
WRONG!!!
I spent more than two weeks, not to mention hundreds of dollars that I really didn't have to spare, picking up the pieces after one side of the RAID got corrupted somehow, and dutifully copied the corruption to its mirror.
I guess the best advice I can give you is to quote part of what he said:
I hope that I have given you enough information so that you can begin to research the subject for yourself, and - ultimately - decide what kind of backup strategy works best for you.
What say ye?
Jim (JR)
System Restore, as good as it is, can't save you if the problem is more drastic. For example, a hard drive crash; or when malware, (or a poorly written piece of software), wanders willy-nilly over your hard drive leaving a trail of dead or wounded disk clusters in it's wake. In the case where the physical or logical integrity of your storage media has been damaged or destroyed, System Restore cannot help you.
In the same vein, System Restore cannot help you if you're brain-dead at the wheel and "accidentally" permanently delete your one-and-only draft of your Doctoral Thesis, some other document, file, or whatever that is similarly valuable and irreplaceable.
In this kind of situation, what you need is a backup.
Backups come in a whole host of shapes, sizes, colors and flavors, depending on what you need; ranging from something as simple as copying cherished family photos to a CD, to something as difficult as managing the backup methodology for Wikipedia's online databases and file servers to ensure data consistency.
If a particular file, or files, are important, you should invest time into making periodic copies of the data while it's evolving. In the case of program source files, or important document files that are subject to continuing edits, some kind of version control system could be vitally important as well.
However, in many cases what we want to preserve, and possibly restore, is the entire state of a particular computer system at a given point in time.
There are two basic methods for making these kinds of system backups:
- "Bare-Metal"backups
- Snapshots
Bare-metal Backups:
The easiest way to backup a system is via a complete system image, otherwise known as a "bare-metal" backup.
A bare-metal backup is one that takes an existing, known working, system and makes a literal, (clone), image of it, byte-for-byte, that can be used to re-create the exact same system on different hardware at some future time if need be. In other words, you can recreate the imaged system on "bare-metal" - that is a system that does not have a working operating system installed yet.
Example:
You have a computer that has Windows 7 on it, and it's working wonderfully. At some point in time, you decide you want to upgrade the system to Windows 8 by doing an in-place upgrade rather than re-installing the entire O/S from scratch. And. . . Though you are confident that the engineers and programmers at Microsoft have done a wonderfully thorough job of making sure the upgrade is painless, you want to be able to restore the original system if your upgrade experience is somewhat less than stellar.
In situations like this, bare-metal backups are the best way to preserve the system as it was prior to the upgrade.
Obviously, a literal byte-for-byte image of a three terabyte hard drive would be huge
Fortunately, modern system imaging software handles this problem using a two-pronged approach.
- It creates a sparse file, copying only the parts of the disk that are actually being used.
- It attempts to compress the data that is there, if safely possible.
The disadvantages are more subtle: Unless your filesystem is absolutely pristine - totally consistent [1] [2] with no errors whatsoever - the image created may look more like Frankenstein's Monster, than a usable filesystem. Fortunately, most disk cloning software is particularly paranoid when it comes to file system integrity, and will stubbornly refuse to go any further if it sees anything out of the ordinary.
Theoretically, (and that really should be in quotation marks!), all cloning software should support most, if not all, modern filesystems. Despite the claims of some disk imaging software, I prefer to use the Windows based software for imaging Windows drives and Linux based software for imaging Linux drives.
My two favorites are:
- Acronis True Image (payware), for Windows based filesystems.
- I have used, and can endorse, the 2012 version of Acronis True Image, though there is a newly released 2013 version that I have not yet tried.
- Clonezilla (GPL freeware) for Linux based filesystems.
- I have also used Clonezilla for backing up my Linux servers, especially prior to in-place upgrades, and it has worked well for me.
- Note that Clonezilla claims to support non-'nix based filesystems, like NTFS or HPFS. However I have not tried it using these filesystems and cannot vouch for it. Your Mileage May, (and probably will), Vary.
Both Acronis True Image and Clonezilla can be used as "live CD's", meaning that you can boot the system from the CD and take an image of the entire filesystem while it is at rest. (IMHO, the best way to obtain a completely consistent system image.)
The advantage of taking an image while the system is not running is obvious: The filesystem is static so there is no chance of any changes taking place while the backup is being taken. Because the filesystem is static, the image created is an exact copy of the system state at that point in time. This can be useful when disinfecting a drive, or doing data recovery.
The disadvantage of a system like this is the same as its advantage: The filesystem must not be running.
In other words, the system must be stopped, the backup taken, (which can take non-trivial amounts of time depending on the size of the disks and the amount of the disk that is being used), and then the system must be re-started. Obviously, while the backup is being performed, the system is not available for use. Equally obvious is that systems which must be on-line 24/7 cannot tolerate this kind of "cold system" backup and it's associated downtime.
Likewise, most bare-metal backup software will not restore an image to a hard drive smaller than the original, even if most of the space on the drive is unused. Depending on the software being used, this can be mitigated by shrinking the partitions to the smallest size possible prior to making the backup, and then re-expanding them to the size of the hard drive they're installed on after the restore is finished.
Another potential disadvantage is that - in some cases - the image is atomic in and of itself, so that it is not possible to extract parts of the image, (particular files, for example), without restoring the entire image.
Luckily this is not universally true, and some of the better backup software allow the created images to be explored, and portions extracted, as if they were just one big zip file.
- Acronis True Image allows its images to be explored and individual parts of an image can be retrieved if the True Image Windows software application is installed.
- Clonezilla does not directly support file extraction from within an image, though there is a workaround described on the Clonezilla site. (Note: It appears to be a butt ugly hack that involves jumping through flaming hoops and (IMHO), I would steer clear of it unless absolutely necessary.)
- Surprisingly enough, some of the expensive high-end backup solutions do not support file extraction from within an image either. (Ref: IBM Tivoli Support Technical Exchange Web Seminar: Differences between image and snapshot backups)
Snapshot Backups:
Snapshot backups are a little bit different than a bare-metal backup.
- Snapshot backups can be taken while the system is running. In other words, they do not need a "cold" or static filesystem prior to taking the snapshot.
- Snapshot backups are not "bare-metal" backups, despite what some people may think.
Snapshot backups are frozen-in-time copies of the state of a machine, taken while the machine is running.
There are various ways of taking snapshots[1] [2], however the method used by VMware is illustrative.
- You begin with a running virtual machine, configured and running the way you like it.
- The very first snapshot pauses the machine briefly while a complete copy of the machine state at that instant in time is created. This becomes the snapshot baseline.
- The filesystem is marked as a "copy on write" filesystem, where any writes to the disk made after the initial snapshot are created, are stored in a special file.
- The second snapshot is virtually instantaneous, as the currently running "copy on write" file is closed, marked as the second snapshot file, and a new copy-on-write file is created starting at that instant in time.
- Subsequent snapshots perform the same action as the second snapshot.
Restoring to a particular snapshot point-in-time is essentially the reverse of the above procedure.
Snapshot backups have some interesting advantages:
- Snapshots can be taken while the machine is running. (i.e. It does not require a "cold" system.)
- Individual snapshots, after the first one, are virtually instantaneous.
- Snapshots can be taken as often as desired, within the storage limits of the machine.
Snapshot backups have their disadvantages too:
- You cannot bare-metal restore from snapshots. However, if you stop to take a bare-metal baseline prior to creating your first snapshot, you have a convenient point of reference if everything goes to Hell in a Hand-Basket.
- Snapshots consist of an ordered sequence of files that contain the differences between each file and the file immediately proceeding it. Because of this, if any one of the snapshot files is destroyed or corrupted, any subsequent snapshot files are useless.
- Depending on the software being used, the effect of a snapshot on open files may not be well defined.
The subject of backups is a complex one, as even a cursory on-line reading of the subject will show. The various backup methods have their individual supporters, and discussions about which backup method is best is akin to the religious wars during the Middle Ages.
Unfortunately, there is really no "one-size-fits-all" solution for backups, as it depends on what your individual requirements are, how much storage you can afford, and how much risk you are willing to take.
Update:
Bennette, in his comment below, pointed out that I had actually left out a good chunk of the "backup" process, and that is actually verifying that the backups are worth a damn. I have seen large and tech-savvy companies get their lunch eaten because they grew complacent about their backups.
An ISP provider that I used to use got trapped this way. They had a really fancy striped RAID-5+1 setup on their servers. . . And with all that redundancy, backups aren't really that important, right?
Good 'Ole Mr. Murphy steps in one night when everyone else is asleep at the wheel and introduces just a teeny, tiny bit of corruption. And, not unlike the Fabergé shampoo commercial, it corrupted two things, and they corrupted two more things, and. . . Well you get the picture. Many weeks, huge gobs of money, and a tremendous hit to their customer good-will later - they finally got everything back up and running.
I have had this happen to me as well. I learned my lesson awhile ago when I had a nice RAID-1 array go south on me - and there I am thinking about how clever I am with my (ahem!) "bulletproof" RAID with it's "built-in backup". Right?
WRONG!!!
I spent more than two weeks, not to mention hundreds of dollars that I really didn't have to spare, picking up the pieces after one side of the RAID got corrupted somehow, and dutifully copied the corruption to its mirror.
I guess the best advice I can give you is to quote part of what he said:
A serious backup policy, especially one for systems that contain mission-critical data, should include regular "fire drills" where the steps for recovering a system are rehearsed.Truer words have never been spoken!
I hope that I have given you enough information so that you can begin to research the subject for yourself, and - ultimately - decide what kind of backup strategy works best for you.
What say ye?
Jim (JR)
Sunday, November 11, 2012
Never Buy Another Hard Drive!
How to Get Replacement Hard Drives for Free
Hard drives are expensive.
Large hard drives are very expensive.
Replacing a failed hard drive is not only expensive, but it's also a pain in the tush.
How would you like to be able to replace a failed hard drive virtually instantly, and not have to pay for future replacements?
Did I just hear everyone scream "YESSSSS!!!!"?
Believe it or not, it's not that difficult. The magic word here is "warranty". As in "hard drive warranty".
One of the little known facts about hard drives is that they usually come with rather nice warranty periods - especially if it's a newer drive, or something they're trying to push. More importantly, typical hard drive warranty periods run from three to five years, depending on the drive.
Unfortunately, most people do not realize that their hard drive might still be under warranty, or they don't even think about hard drive warranties, so they end up needlessly spending a lot of hard-earned cash paying for drive replacements they shouldn't have to pay for.
Since YOU just happen to be one of those clever folks who don't like to pay extra, and are willing to make the hard drive manufacturers stand behind their products, this is how you do it.
Of course, being the clever person you are, YOU already know all about this, right? Now you can send this to all your friends so they become even MORE impressed with your God-like expertise!
Voilà! A shiny new hard drive - with a full manufacturer's warranty - free! (Or almost nearly so.)
What say ye?
Jim (JR)
Large hard drives are very expensive.
Replacing a failed hard drive is not only expensive, but it's also a pain in the tush.
How would you like to be able to replace a failed hard drive virtually instantly, and not have to pay for future replacements?
Did I just hear everyone scream "YESSSSS!!!!"?
Believe it or not, it's not that difficult. The magic word here is "warranty". As in "hard drive warranty".
One of the little known facts about hard drives is that they usually come with rather nice warranty periods - especially if it's a newer drive, or something they're trying to push. More importantly, typical hard drive warranty periods run from three to five years, depending on the drive.
Unfortunately, most people do not realize that their hard drive might still be under warranty, or they don't even think about hard drive warranties, so they end up needlessly spending a lot of hard-earned cash paying for drive replacements they shouldn't have to pay for.
Since YOU just happen to be one of those clever folks who don't like to pay extra, and are willing to make the hard drive manufacturers stand behind their products, this is how you do it.
Of course, being the clever person you are, YOU already know all about this, right? Now you can send this to all your friends so they become even MORE impressed with your God-like expertise!
- First, you should decide on what hard drive size is most commonly used by you. In my case, I use a lot of two terabyte drives.
- Go buy one on sale somewhere. Look in the internet, price match if you can. This one purchased drive is your "in stock" spare. Of course you want to do this before a drive fails, but even if you didn't - go get a new version of the drive you need.
With a little bit of luck, (or forethought), you already have a backup of what you had on the failed, (or failing), drive, so that you can restore to the new, "spare", drive you just purchased or had "in stock". - Go to the manufacturers web site and download their disk diagnostic tools disk, which is usually an .ISO image of a CD. Burn it to CD, pop it in your system, boot it, and then run the diagnostics on your failed drive. There's a good chance you won't have to run anything more than the "quick test" to uncover the problem.
- The disk test will give you an error code - write it down somewhere - this is important!
- Remove the drive from your computer, and either install the new drive that you've cloned from the old one, or go to another computer. (Or, boot a live Linux disk, and use the web-browser there. :-) )
- With the drive out of the machine, go to the manufacturers web site and find the "return" or "warranty" link - it's usually under "Support".
- Enter the drive's model number and serial number and it should give you the warranty status of your drive. If it's not older that three or four years - and many aren't - it will tell you that the drive is "in warranty"
- The site should then give you the option to process a warranty return. Here is where you will need the error code(s) you copied down before. You might have to enter the model and serial numbers again.
- Once it accepts the return, it will ask for your name and postal address to ship the new drive to - and it will probably ask for a credit card. They do this just in case you don't return the old one. Normally this is free of charge, or they might ask a nominal fee for shipping an advance-replacement to you.
- In about a week or so, you get your new drive in the mail, and it usually includes a pre-paid return label for UPS or FedEx.
- If you've already replaced the failed drive, open the box, remove the new drive, (keep it in the static bag!), and set it aside as a spare. Otherwise, swap drives.
- Put the old drive in the static bag, put it back in the box the same way the new one was packaged, seal it up, stick on the label, and send it on it's way. Make sure you get a receipt for the shipment, just in case it gets lost.
Voilà! A shiny new hard drive - with a full manufacturer's warranty - free! (Or almost nearly so.)
What say ye?
Jim (JR)
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
A Linux After Dinner "Mint"
A First Look at Linux Mint 13
When the dust cleared, (and the bodies were removed), the distribution left standing at the end of it all was Linux Mint. This was a bit of a shock to me since Mint went head-to-head with some of the heaviest of the heavyweight distributions; defeating distro's like Ubuntu and Fedora who normally send opponents scrambling for cover. Mint went head-to-head with the best distributions out there, they were all compared based on a whole host of differing criteria, and at the end of it all Mint had really made a name for itself.
As to the "why" of it's victory, I can't do much better than refer you to the statement made by the folks at Linux Format, when they said, (something like), "Linux Mint isn't about new or flashy features, it's about stability and usability." They went on to say that Linux Mint would often avoid the whizz-bang features of other distributions, concentrating on what they know works and works well.
What really differentiates Mint is the fact that they base their distributions on Ubuntu's "LTS" (Long Term Support), releases instead of whatever flashy new release was just tossed at an unsuspecting public. Even with that, they carefully pick-and-choose what pieces of the latest LTS release they want to include, skipping anything that they don't believe offers real value to their users.
Another differentiating feature of Mint is their new desktop manager, Cinnamon. They saw that many Ubuntu users, (including Yours Truly!), were getting heartily tired of the Gnome vs KDE desktop wars, their dissatisfaction with the bizarre desktop that Ubuntu calls "Unity," and Canonical's seeming deaf ear to user suggestions or complaints.
Seeing their disgust, the folks at Mint developed an in-house desktop called Cinnamon. Cinnamon is a light-weight desktop following the basic Mint premise of eschewing flash and glamor in favor of a stable, working, desktop manager that does everything you need, and nothing you don't.
The distinguishing feature of Mint's implementation of Cinnamon is the absence of "features." They don't throw IM clients, e-mail clients, and other assorted horse-hooey at you. They don't clutter your desktop with various kinds of "super-bars", or other unessential cruft and bloat. It's remarkable in its muted color-scheme as opposed to the garish colors of Ubuntu's Unity desktop.
In fact, the "it just works" design philosophy of the Cinnamon desktop has become so popular that other Linux distributions have begun using, or offering, the Cinnamon desktop with their own releases.
 |
| The Linux Mint "Cinnamon" desktop, notable for it's clean, open appearance and muted color scheme. |
Aside from the lack of clutter on the desktop, (the only two icons that appear by default are the "Computer" and "Home" folders), the task bar / system tray at the bottom is the only real tool-bar on Mint's Cinnamon desktop. This provides a big working surface that is easily configured to your own personal tastes.
 |
| The Mint "task bar" has icons for the "Start" menu, (the gear and "menu"), Reveal Desktop, (the green box), Mozilla Firebird, a Terminal window, and the Nautilus file manager |
 |
| The Mint "System Tray" has only the few icons needed to give you a quick "heads up" on the status of your system. |
My only real beef with Mint's task bar is that it's a bit too thin for my taste. Since I have just started messing with this myself, I may well find a setting that allows me to change it's size.
 |
| The initial view of Mint's Cinnamon desktop at first login, showing the "Welcome" window and selections. |
Normally, I really hate having a pop-up screen shoved into my face, be it at first boot or otherwise. Strangely enough, Mint's initial dialog isn't really "in-your-face" as it blends in nicely to the rest of the desktop. Its message is polite and respectful, and the various options offered are actually useful.
Though you have the option to avoid seeing this dialog at start-up, I have found it sufficiently useful that, at least for now, I keep it there for my own reference.
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| An enlarged view of Mint's "Welcome" window, showing a number of useful and interesting links. |
I really like both the design and layout of Mint's default Cinnamon desktop. Most other desktops, (at least in my opinion), look like something designed for hawk-eyed 20 year old eyes. Either the color choices are too bizarre, or the control elements are way too small for my own eyesight.
Likewise, Cinnamon's organization of both the desktop and the various window controls is strikingly similar to the Windows desktop, which makes the transition from one to the other a much less painful process.
Mint is one of the easier distributions to install and use. This makes sense as it is one of the many Ubuntu re-spins out there and the whole Ubuntu heritage was built on usability.
Linux Mint, in the true spirit of Ubuntu's tradition of offering choices, creates several different spins of each distribution, with the Gnome, KDE, or Cinnamon desktops preinstalled. You want Gnome? No prob! You download the "Gnome" version and away you go. Likewise with KDE or Cinnamon.
Mint 13 includes the usual plethora of applications and other "stuff" that seems to be expected in a desktop system, including things like the Gimp image editor, and Libre Office.
Additionally, their standard distribution comes with all the codecs and viewers that you normally have to go hunting for, and it also includes, pre-installed, Adobe Reader and Flash. The result of all this effort is a distribution that is ready for prime-time, right out of the box.
Of course, if you are a distribution purist, they also create distribution spins without all the limited rights stuff installed. It's your choice.
In the same vein, unlike Ubuntu and other clones, all of the useful repositories are pre-selected by default. This means that you don't have to re-configure the update manager to include the repositories you need.
The other side of all that effort in your behalf is that after you finish the installation, you should go check for updates. When I checked for updates after my own install, there were something like 450 updates listed. However the total size for all the updates was less than 500 megs, and they were all done - soup to nuts - in less than a half-hour.
Oh, and while we're on the subject of updates and download speeds. . . . . .
One of the nicest touches I found was an option within the update manager's configuration settings that would test each of the Linux Mint mirror sites, and then offer you the best and fastest mirror site based on where you are.
The bottom line is that Linux Mint 13 is an eminently usable distribution. If you are used to the way other distributions organize things, there might be just a bit of a learning curve here. However I don't think this will be much of a problem since things are conveniently placed where you would reasonably expect to find them.
Likewise the open and uncluttered desktop allows you to organize your workspace in whatever way you are most comfortable with.
I think it's worth your time to go take a look. If you've become annoyed with all the flash-bang cruft in other distributions, I think you will be pleasantly surprised with Linux Mint. You can go find it here. (Though be patient, sometimes the site's a bit slow to load. . .)
What say ye?
Jim (JR)
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