Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Six hours spent trying to install Linux Mint 12.

I've been using Linux on the desktop for about 18 years now and needless to say I know my way around pretty well. I've been using Ubuntu 10.04 LTS for the last year or so and recently upgraded to two new drives on my work system. Rather than reinstalling 10.04 LTS I decided to give Linux Mint 12 a try. The catch is that I wanted to do software RAID 1 for the boot partition and RAID 0 for the system. Ubuntu allows software RAID configuration using its alternate installation media and Linux Mint (although initially based on Ubuntu) doesn't provide an alternate install. I found a guide on the Linux Mint forums which can be followed to manually configure software RAID during installation. Linux Mint's immaturity as an OS reared it's ugly head when I neared the end of the install and the installer wouldn't let me proceed. Long story short I ended up installing Ubuntu 11.10 using the alternate install media and had a software RAID system up and running in about 20 minutes.