DeMignon: With Win7 dropping out of support it's indeed a good time to switch my rig to Linux, though I'm bound to evil IE for work reasons to a certain degree. Maybe I'll setup dual boot or get a used second device for this..
A virtual machine might be a good idea for that purpose :)
matterbandit: I did not realize there was a serious performance hit with Virtualbox, thanks for letting me know. Ideally, I wanted to try dual-booting, but I'm afraid I'll screw something up permanantly as I've never attempted a dual boot before.
A virtual machine can help with that - install Windows first and then Mint.
The easiest way to dual boot is to have a second HDD/SSD dedicated to Mint and use the guided option to install to it to that drive, otherwise to have them both share a disk the installer will need to resize Windows' partitions.
matterbandit: If I need help along the way, where is the best place for linux noob's to post around here? Do we chat you up directly?
Or can we post our questions here? Thx in advance!
You can post questions there :)
matterbandit: Edit: Would some strong hardware negate any performance hit with Virtualbox?
To an extent, but ultimately its graphics performance will still be far slower than real hardware. It is possible to get good performance out of a VM by having a second GPU and dedicating that to the VM, but the problems with that are you need to install a second GPU just for the VM and I've heard that setting up a GPU passthrough can be a PITA.
Paradoks: Now my problem (I admit, I've spent only 20 minutes looking for an answer) is as follows. I noticed an effect similar to screen tearing on my monitor connected via HDMI. I updated the Nvidia driver to the one recommended by the system, and now the system can't see my second monitor at all (I'm stuck with laptop screen). Unplugging and plugging the monitor back or turning it off and on results in a short blink on the laptop screen, so I assume that it at least is trying to detect it, but still, only the laptop screen is listed. VGA port works, but that's no help when I get back home, since my TV only has HDMI, and second, I'm not sure if it's actually Nvidia or my integrated Intel Graphics that's running through that.
Any ideas? Any help would be appreciated.
I don't have any experience with dual-GPU laptops so I can't offer much help, but I have heard that they can be a bit of a hassle, although things are supposed to be a bit better now. There should be a tool for showing which GPU is active and switching between them; check System Settings --> Applets and enable the NVIDIA Prime applet if it isn't already active. You should then see an icon for it in the system tray.
To see if it's detecting the external monitor, try Menu --> Administration --> System Reports --> System information and see if it's shown there. You can also run "xrandr" from a terminal to show the current display outputs and active displays.
Your keyboard should have a function key combination (usually Fn + one of the F keys) for switching between monitors; you could also try using that and seeing what it does.
Another thing is to check with the Nvidia settings panel (which should be found in the system menu - if for some reason the Nvidia settings panel hasn't been installed you can install it manually through the Software Manager) and seeing what that says. You should also add the proprietary graphics drivers PPA for more recent drivers if you haven't already done so.
BStone: Yeah, I was trying to get FO3 to run with Mint 32-bit and gave up, but I will try again with 64-bit.
FO3 is 32-bit so the wrapper should work on a 32-bit system; it's likely that you were just missing some of Wine's dependencies. My common dependencies meta-package should get everything needed but that's only for 64-bit systems... nowadays there's no reason to use a 32-bit install though, unless your system's CPU is so old that it doesn't support 64-bit.
