The Perfect Desktop - Linux Mint 11 (Katya) - Page 2

3 Update The System

When you log in for the first time, you will most likely see a notification icon in the lower right corner which means that updates for the installed software are available:

Open the main menu and click on the All applications button:

To install the updates, go to Applications > Administration > Update Manager:

Type in your password:

The Update Manager tells you which updates are available. If you update the system for the first time, there probably is only one package, mintupdate. Click on Install Updates to install it:

mintupdate is now being downloaded and installed:

After mintupdate has been installed, the list of available updates will be reloaded. You will probably see a few more updates. Click on Install Updates to install them:

The updates are being downloaded and installed (this can take a few minutes):

When the update is complete, the Update Manager window will close. The icon in the lower right corner should now look like this which indicates that the system is up-to-date:

4 Flash Player And Java

Linux Mint 11 installs the Macromedia Flash Player by default. To see if the Flash plugin is working, start Firefox (Applications > Internet > Firefox Web Browser). Then type about:plugins in the address bar. Firefox will then list all installed plugins, and it should list the Flash Player (version 10.3 d162) among them:

You should also find the Java plugin in the list which means Java is installed as well:

5 NVIDIA/ATI Drivers

If you have an NVIDIA or ATI graphics card and want to use 3D acceleration (e.g. for Compiz-Fusion), you must install the proprietary NVIDIA or ATI driver. To do this, use the Additional Drivers Manager (Applications > Administration > Additional Drivers):

6 Inventory Of What We Have So Far

Now let's browse all menus under Applications to see which of our needed applications are already installed:

You should find the following situation ([x] marks an application that is already installed, where [ ] is an application that is missing):

Graphics:
[x] The GIMP
[ ] Shotwell Photo Manager
[ ] Picasa

Internet:
[x] Firefox
[ ] Opera
[ ] Chromium
[x] Flash Player
[ ] FileZilla
[x] Thunderbird
[ ] Evolution
[ ] aMule
[x] Transmission BitTorrent Client
[ ] Vuze
[x] Pidgin
[ ] Skype
[ ] Google Earth
[x] Xchat IRC
[ ] Gwibber Social Client

Office:
[x] LibreOffice Writer
[x] LibreOffice Calc
[ ] Adobe Reader
[ ] GnuCash
[ ] Scribus

Sound & Video:
[ ] Amarok
[ ] Audacity
[x] Banshee
[x] MPlayer
[ ] Rhythmbox Music Player
[ ] gtkPod
[ ] XMMS
[ ] dvd::rip
[ ] Kino
[ ] Sound Juicer CD Extractor
[x] VLC Media Player
[x] Totem
[ ] Xine
[x] Brasero
[ ] K3B
[ ] Multimedia-Codecs

Programming:
[ ] KompoZer
[ ] Bluefish
[ ] Quanta Plus

Other:
[ ] VirtualBox
[ ] TrueType fonts
[x] Java
[x] Read/Write support for NTFS partitions

So some applications are already on the system. NTFS read-/write support is enabled by default on Linux Mint 11.