Back on February 1st 2010, I said I was going to wait on installing Linux again on my new Sager NP8690. Well that didn’t last too long. Over the past weekend I ran Symantec Ghost to backup my hard drive, downloaded and installed openSuSE 11.2 64bit. Installation went well, I installed KDE and Gnome desktop environments. However openSuSE 11.2 ran a little sluggish. Although openSuSE was my first Linux distro, I can’t see myself running a distro that doesn’t thrill me. I have a lot of respect for the openSuSE developers and I think they have a fine product. I reinstalled the backup image and move to Linux Mint 8.
With Linux Mint 8 64bit, the installation was easy as always. What I really like the most was having everything work as soon as installation was complete. Of course I had to install the Nvidia drivers to enable Desktop Effects. After rebooting the PC, I was able to log onto Facebook and run Farmville, Fishville, and Happy Aquarium. I also watched the Avatar movie preview at Apple.com/trailers, and watch the Mac Ads. I also watched a few video clips on Youtube, clips from my Video folder, and listen to MP3s.
Although I can connect to my television set using HDMI, I am unable to get the resolution correct. Also I cannot play Blu-Ray movies (Star Trek) in Linux Mint. I did read there are some hack I can run, but to be honest I would rather have a player already installed or a codex available for VLC. I wouldn’t mind paying for a native application from Corel who sell WinDVD, an application that work well from my perspective.
I plan on running Windows 7 Ultimate and Linux Mint 8 in parallel for many of my applications. Although I use IMAP for my Google account, I’m not sure I want to check e-mail on both OSs. I still may set it up, but I need to decide which OS for my primary e-mail.
ratedmaxpower 
2 replies on “Installed Linux Mint 8 64bit”
Hey!
Sorry for posting again on here, but I bought the same laptop, and I’m wondering about Linux compatibility. Any specific problems you’ve faced?
Thanks!
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Installing Linux Mint 6 64 bit was easy. No real problems. Of course since you have a Nvidia card, you will need to install the Nvidia drivers through Hardware Detection (or whatever that application is called).
I still run into the random reboot issue, but I noticed that only happen when I am on Facebook playing games. It seems there is an issue with Flash in a 64bit environment. I installed the 64 bit version so I can take advantage of 6GB RAM. If I do a reinstall in the future, I will go with the 32 bit version. It seems to be more stable. Even the 32 bit version of Linux Mint I run at work has been up for 69 days since Friday.
I think you will be happy with Linux on the Sager NP8690. I might try out Ubuntu 10.4 but then I still have to install all the multimedia again. Maybe I’ll wait for the next version of Mint.
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