So this is Christmas and what have you done, the old year is over, the new one just begun! Note for Mr Lennon, buy a new calendar mate.

It's been the usual sort of Christmas festivities, I collected Charis from University earlier this month in what proved to be a fairly strenuous exercise in transport and the national rail system.

Preparations for Christmas were pretty much of a muchness and consisted of buying more food and drink than two people could hope to consume, while at the same time failing to have food for basic meals (unless you have somehow come to decide that dinner can be had from a handful of peanuts a bottle of brandy and cheese - which is silly because that is what I had for breakfast!)

I had Ruth and her boyfriend over for boxing along with their mother and James and a fairly pleasant time was had by all. Unfortunately Debbie and James had to head home before Ruth and Chris left which was a shame. But the munchkin seemed to like the presents he had from us and Charis's remote control cyberman went down very well indeed. The trouble and at the same time the wonderful thing about Chrimbo is that days flow gently into one another and all seem the same long long period of relaxation.

Linux Mint 4 Daryna

I was pretty pleased with myself to get my upgraded rig (Core 2 Duo CPU and 775 motherboard) running without loud bangs or other mishaps, but after the reinstall Ubuntu was a little flakey and things which had worked well before now either didn't work well or didn't work at all. In particular my media player of choice VLC seemed to have decided not to play any sounds no matter how much I tinkered. So turning a frown upside down, I decided an install of Linux Mint 4 was the order of the day.

The live CD impressed me, picking up the wireless network first time and playing my collection of avi's, wmv's and ra files with no problems whatsoever.

I can't say it was a completely hassle few experience; the CD stalled the first couple of times I tried to load it but three goes and a second burn and I was in. Trying to install on free space on the HDD resulted in a Grub error, but an install using all the space seemed to do the job.

The install also partitioned my external hard drive, which is a nuisance because I will have delete the partition and probably copy file back to the drive. The partition appears on the desktop as an additional drive.

Visually I like Mint4 although the black desktop background that installed as default was less than inspiring for a first time use. Firefox, Thunderbird and the GIMP all appeared as part of the install. No sign of Konqueror which is a shame.

Linux Mint doesn't have any games installed which was a bit of a disappointment and I am not sure if I can get them from the repositories.