Installing Linux Mint 12 on Lenovo x120e

Ubuntu has really been pissing me off lately with the whole GNOME 3 / Unity desktop hokey pokey so I decided to test the waters with some other options. After trying and rejecting some alternate desktop packages within the Ubuntu ecosystem, I decided to try the newly released, Ubuntu-derived Linux Mint 12.

Installation

Since my computer (Lenovo ThinkPad x120e) doesn't have an optical drive, I downloaded the Linux Mint 12 CD (64-bit) release image and used Ubuntu's "Create a USB startup disk" utility to write it to my flash drive. However, when I tried to boot from it, it kept failing at the bootloader with an error that I can't quite remember (I'll try to reproduce the problem, for search indexing's sake).

I installed the unetbootin package, though, and it created a working drive on the first try. Once I booted into the Mint live system, installation proceeded smoothly and identically to a normal Ubuntu install.

First Impressions

Upon rebooting into my shiny new installation, the restricted driver manager popped up and acknowledged my Broadcom wireless card and Radeon graphics. The wireless drivers never kicked in, though, and the graphics displayed text wrong in the panels and menus (some letters and words were a scrambled, garbled mess).

The lack of wireless *and* a proper graphics driver was a definite deal-breaker for me, so that's where my first experience ended. I hope to give it another shot soon, so I'll update this post if I have any better luck.

UPDATE (12/05/11): I switched over to Linux Mint Debian, which is a rolling-release version based on Debian Testing. Again, installation was successful and fast. Debian doesn't have some of Ubuntu's noob-friendly utilities, such as the 'Additional Drivers' (jockey) utility, so you'll have to manually install the fglrx-driver package and then configure your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to get accelerated graphics. There is an automated tool, aticonfig, that you can use to configure your xorg.conf. The following command will install the fglrx driver and the helper libraries to get accelerated video decoding, then invoke the aticonfig command to automatically configure your xorg to use the new driver (Thanks Erik!):

sudo apt-get install libva1 libva-x11-1 libva-tpi1 libva-glx1 libva-dev xvba-va-driver fglrx-atieventsd fglrx-control fglrx-driver fglrx-glx fglrx-glx-ia32 fglrx-modules-dkms

Thankfully, Mint Debian had none of the aforementioned weird rendering issues with the proprietary driver, and Compiz worked just fine (I installed the fusion-icon package so I could turn it on and off more easily).

UPDATE (12/30/11): Erik notes:

I went back to the open source drivers....
They seem to work much better for watching flash movies. For Youtube I use the FVR Flashvideoreplacer addon. The other websites are better with the open source drivers then with fglrx.

So, if you watch a lot of Flash video (youtube, Hulu, etc.), you might be better off sticking with the default, open source drivers, buy YMMV, so be sure to try both.

I have not yet been able to get my Broadcom wireless working, but I'll try to update this post if/when I get it figured out. If you are fortunate enough to have chosen the other wireless chipset, you should be fine out-of-the-box.