Scientechie

By now, I have tested many Linux distros. But I had yet to come across any distro that actually did better in VMware then on actual hardware.

Meet Mint 6 Felicia, the community “Fluxbox” remake. The Fluxbox is a window manager that replaces Gnome’s default window manager. It is lightweight, customizable, and fast.

It performed absolutely flawlessly on VMware: no configuration issues, no graphics problems, perfect resolution detection. I also got a seamless installation of VMware tools, and the Unity mode worked flawlessly too. The Fluxbox menus were responsive, fast, and short of the special Compiz eye-candy, the distro ran as well on my VMware deployment as the best distros run on proper hardware.

Compare that to the problems it gave me on my real Acer Ferrari 5005WLMi. It had sound problems (sound coming in bursts), the codecs failed to work, the Flux box menus would sometimes not draw correctly, and the resolution it detected was nearly half my correct resolution in the X-Axis. Compiz, obviously didn’t run.

I have mixed feelings. Mint 6 Fluxbox, from what it ran on the VMware, seemed to be a great distro. It lacked Inkscape and OpenOffice.org, but otherwise included all codecs and ran my wired network out of the box. I specially liked the MintConfig center. It was stable and fast - a VMware dream.

If only it could present the same performance on my hardware. Most intriguing.

A Customized Mint 6 Fluxbox desktop