Ubuntu is a strong desktop distro, but it falls short for some users in a few areas. Where are the multimedia codecs and DVD support, and what’s with all the brown, for heaven’s sake? If you’d like multimedia support with a minty fresh theme, try Linux Mint 2.2, an Ubuntu-based distro that throws in support for Flash 9, Windows Media Format, DVDs, MP3s, and troublesome wireless cards.

Linux Mint uses the Ubuntu Ubiquity installer. Just pop in the live CD, click the Install icon, and walk through a few simple questions, then wait for the installer to work its magic. After a short wait, Mint is installed and you can reboot into a fresh

I installed Linux Mint 2.2 (”Bianca”) on a notebook with a Pentium 4, 1GB of RAM, an ATI Radeon R250 display adapter, Intel sound card, and an Intersil Prism wireless card. I’m also running an instance of Linux Mint 2.2 under VMware Server on my main desktop.

When I installed Linux Mint on the notebook, the live CD and initial install detected my wireless card just fine. After the install, I was prompted to upgrade packages. One of the updates I pulled down was a kernel update, from 2.6.17-10 to 2.6.17-11. After installing it and rebooting, Mint no longer detected the wireless card. I had to reboot into the old kernel to continue using the wireless network. It looks like this was a problem introduced upstream with the main kernel, as I’ve found some discussion of the problem on the Ubuntu forums.

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