Minimum System Requirements for Linux Mint 12

• x86 or amd64 processor. The ISO you need to download depends on the processor you have. Currently Linux Mint 12 is not available for ia64.
• 512MB of RAM
• 5GB of hard disk space
• Graphics card capable of 800×600 resolution
• CD/DVD or USB support

However the above minimum system configuration is not good enough for a good experience with Linux Mint 12. For example, to get GNOME 3 running in full power, you need a 3D capable video card. Following is the recommended base configuration for Linux Mint 12,

Recommended System Requirements for Linux Mint 12

• x86 or amd64 dual core processor (Phenom X2 or Intel E5700 or above) with a clock speed of 2GHZ and above
• 2GB of RAM
• 10GB of hard disk space
• A 3D capable graphics card (NVidia GeForce or ATI cards)
• CD/DVD or USB support

Ideal System Configuration for Linux Mint 12

Lisa is lightning fast on my system. Here are my machine specs,

• Intel Core i5-2500K – 3.3GHz
• 4GB RAM
• 512GB Seagate hard drive
• AMD Radeon HD 6800 with 1GB RAM

If you have older system which is slow while running GNOME 3, you can switch to GNOME classic (without effects) desktop during login (Click on the wheel icon shown in the login screen).

How to Change Linux Mint 12 Duck Duck Go Search Engine to Google Search Engine?

Linux Mint 12 comes with Duck duck go as the default search engine. When you use Mozilla Firefox, the default search engine is shown as DuckDuckGo. Duck duck go project claims that they don’t personalize search results and no type of user tracking is done. If if you are paranoiac about privacy, Duck duck go is the search engine to use.

However I prefer Google search engine and it is easy to change DuckDuckGo to Google search engine. Click on the duck icon inside the search box and select "Manage Search Engines",

Click on the bottom link – "Get more search engines". Firefox will open the search engine list page at http://www.linuxmint.com/searchengines.php. At the bottom of the page you have a tiny list of icons representing other search engines,

Click on the Google icon in the other engines list.

Now again click on the duck icon in the search field located at the top of Firefox. You will see a new option named Add "Google". Click on "Add Google" option. This will change the default search engine in Linux Mint 12  to Google.

After installing Google engine, you can use the Firefox URL field for entering search keywords. If you enter a web address you are taken to the address else you are taken to the Google search results for the text you entered. This feature is not available in Duck Duck Go engine.

Downloading Linux Mint 12

Linux Mint 12 is available as a 32-bit or 64-bit edition. In each edition, you have two options, you can either download the CD version which doesn’t contain codecs/MATE or download the DVD version which contains both. The recommended download is the 32-bit DVD which contains Gnome and MATE. You can download Linux Mint 12 from here.

Boot your machine with the DVD created from the downloaded ISO file.

Installing Linux Mint 12

The DVD is a live DVD and immediately after booting you can start using Linux Mint 12. To install Lisa to your hard drive click on "Install Linux Mint" shortcut.

Select your preferred language and click on continue. Lisa tells you that for best results, you need the following,

• At least 5.6GB of hard drive space
• An active connection to internet

Note that 5.6GB is the absolute minimum you need and if you have large swap partition this is not enough. I suggest you install Linux Mint 12 to a partition which has at least 10GB free space.

If you don’t have any other operating system on your hard drive you will get the following options.

You can either let Linux Mint 12 to partition your disk automatically or you can partition manually. If you selected automatic partition, Mint will create a primary partition and a swap partition.

Alternatively you can create partitions manually. For example, I selected the following options for a 500GB hard disk with 2GB RAM,

Give a swap space which is at least twice the size of your system’s RAM. Also you can create additional partitions for boot and home mount points if you want them to be logically separated.

Click on "Install Now" to begin installation. During installation, you are prompted to select your location, keyboard layout and username/password. You can choose between automatic login or manual login. Select "encrypt my home folder" option if you need high security of your data.

Click on continue. Linux Mint 12 will download language packs from internet if an active connection is available. During installation, a slide show of Linux Mint 12 features are shown. In my Intel i5 system with 4GB RAM, it took less than 5 minutes for Linux Mint 12 installation.

After installation, remove the DVD from drive and restart the system. You should see the new GNOME 3 based login screen. During login you can select one of the GNOME desktop types. Select GNOME to login with GNOME 3.

Keeping Linux Mint 12 Secure and Stable

Once you login to GNOME, you are shown a welcome screen which lists various resources available for Linux Mint 12. On the top menu bar you will see a flashing shield icon which indicates that you have various patches available for download. Click on the icon to download and install all pending patches. These are updates to the system after the last DVD release. Updating the patches keeps your system secure and stable. It took me about half an hour to apply all the updates.

The DVD 32 bit installer comes with a good set of applications focusing mainly on Internet and Media players. Following is the complete list of applications under each category,

• Graphics  – Gimp, LibreOffice Draw, gThumb Image Viewer, Simple Scan, Image Viewer and Document Viewer
• Internet – Firefox, Pidgin, Thunderbird Emails, XChat IRC, Transmission BitTorrent client, Sun Java 6 Web Start
• Office – LibreOffice Suite
• Media Players – Brasero, Banshee, GNOME MPlayer, VLC media player, Movie Player and Sound recorder
• Others – Sun Java 6, Standard Linux Tools

The centralized Linux Mint 12 repository has over 35,000 applications. Use the Software manager application to find and install these packages. The packages are well organized and are listed based on its popularity. Ratings and user reviews of the applications are useful in deciding on a download.

For example, the Eclipse IDE is available for download under the programming category,

If you are not able to login to GNOME 3 desktop, check whether your system has 3D acceleration turned on. This is common problem if you are installing Lisa on VMware or VirtualBox virtual machines.

Even after turning on 3D acceleration, sometimes the system booted to MATE desktop even when I selected GNOME 3 during login. It seems there are still some open issues with GNOME 3 integration.

The key new features in Linux Mint 12 include,

• GNOME 3 with MGSE (Mint Gnome Shell Extensions)
• MATE a fork of GNOME 2 which is compatible with GNOME 3
• Improvements in visual interface
• Linux 3.0 kernel
• Ubuntu 11.10 updates
• Duck duck go search engine

Follow my earlier tutorials for installing Tiny Core Linux and Java,

• Install Tiny Core Linux on hard drive
• Install OpenJDK on Tiny Core Linux

This tutorial uses Tiny Core Linux 4.1 and OpenJDK6. However the steps are similar if you use Java 7 or Oracle binaries for Java.

Installing Tomcat 7 with OpenJDK on Tiny Core Linux

Go to Tomcat 7 download page and note down a mirror URL for the tomcat-7.0.22.tar.gz file. From the Tiny Core Linux terminal download the file using wget (depending on the mirror the URL may be different),

Since I have already configured /opt as a persistent folder in the hard drive, I decided to install tomcat in /opt. Copy the downloaded tomcat zip file to /opt.

Extract the tomcat binaries using the tar command,

Now we have tomcat 7 installed in /opt/apache-tomcat-7.0.22. To start tomcat, change to the bin folder and invoke the startup script,

You can verify whether tomcat is running by accessing the default URL using wget,

How to Start Tomcat on Tiny Core Linux Startup (Boot) ?

You can configure Tomcat to start automatically whenever Tiny Core Linux is booted. Any command added to /opt/bootlocal.sh in Tiny Core Linux is invoked during system startup. Add the following lines to bootlocal.sh to start Tomcat on system startup,

export CATALINA_HOME=/opt/apache-tomcat-7.0.22
export JAVA_HOME=/usr/local/openjdk-6
/opt/apache-tomcat-7.0.22/bin/startup.sh

Note that the environment variables are required since they may not be set properly when bootlocal.sh commands are invoked.

When Tiny Core Linux was installed with Tomcat 7 and OpenJDK on VirtualBox, the size of the virtual disk created was under 150MB. So this combination is an ideal portable OS for testing your Java web applications on Linux!

Click here for the detailed tutorial on installing Tiny Core Linux in a hard disk. This tutorial also sets the hard disk partition as the location for downloaded extensions. Please note that for Oracle Java installation, hard disk partition requires over 500MB of free space.

Installing OpenJDK in Tiny Core Linux

Installing OpenJDK 6 in Tiny Core Linux is easy since OpenJDK is part of the Tiny Core Linux extension repository. From the bottom menu bar, click on AppBrowser. This opens up the extension manager for Tiny Core Linux.

Click on connect and then search for openjdk. Select openjdk-6-jdk.tcz and then click on the Go button on bottom left. It will take a while to install openjdk since the download size of the package is around 55MB. Note the location of the downloaded extension (/mnt/sda1/tce/optional). It points to the partition assigned for the tce boot code.

Restart Tiny Core Linux and run the following command to verify that Java is installed on TCL,

Installing Oracle Java 6 in Tiny Core Linux

Some people prefer to install Oracle Java since it is usually more stable and well tested with Java programs than OpenJDK. Also some of the applications only work with Oracle JDK.

Download Oracle Java binary file using wget command (from the home folder),

Now you may be wondering how I got the URL for the Java binary. Visit Oracle JDK download site and then click on download link for JDK 6. Accept the license agreement on the next page and then right click and copy the URL for the Linux x86.

Change the type of the downloaded file to an executable file,

Now extract the contents of the binary by running the binary file,

The Java files are extracted to the folder jdk1.6.0_29. During Tiny Core Linux installation, we had configured /opt and /home as persistent folders. Hence we will copy the JDK to /opt folder.

Create java folder,

Go back to home folder and then move the JDK files extracted earlier to /opt/java,

You can set the JAVA_HOME and path to Java binary permanently in the .ashrc file in the home folder (/home/tc),

Add the following content to .ashrc,

export JAVA_HOME=/opt/java/jdk1.6.0_29
export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin

Restart Tiny Core Linux. Run the following command to verify that Oracle Java is installed correctly on Tiny Core Linux.