I'm currently using Linux Mint Helena 8 on my laptop ; and since Linux Mint Julia 10 RC is now available , the idea grew to install Julia on a spare 4GB usb stick I had in my drawer.... Here's how it went :

• Downloaded the Linux Mint 10 32bit iso torrent file at 10h30
• Burned the cd
• booted on the CD - this distros is absolutely gorgeous - so I tried various applications and finally decided it worth a shot.
• selected install from the Live CD
• selected destination as the /dev/sdb 3.8GB filesystem showed by the installer
• around 70% I noticed an update grub event happened
• the installation was completed at 11h09

But nevertheless Linux Mint 10 "Julia" is absolutely gorgeous, the "brushed steel" is perfect, all the icons are like little gems (especially the firefox icon) - the overall experience is absolutely outstanding, I'm currently running it from my 4GB USB key - and still have about 1.1GB of free space available ...

As you may know by default GIMP has two default docks:

• The Toolbox with "The Brushes, Patterns and Gradients dock".
• The LayerBox with "The Layers, Channels and Paths dock".

Which can be a real pain on small display (like 1024x768) - because basically one third of the display is gone for the docks.

But you can actually merge the 2 docks into the Toolbox, the lower part then contains the brushes, etc .. and the Layers - I've worked this way a couple of days and it's very convenient, (before that settings I had always issue with the LayerBox getting in the way).

Now I just press CTRL+L to access the Layers and CTRL+B to access the ToolBox.

The smaller theme I'm using is the official Small theme from the Gimp package but with this line uncommented (search for the keyword "smaller" in the gtkrc file

# Uncommenting this line allows to set a different (smaller) font for GIMP.
#font_name = "sans 8"
font_name = "DroidSans 8"

Also Here's the content of the gimprc file

# GIMP gimprc
#
# This is your personal gimprc file. Any variable defined in this file takes
# precedence over the value defined in the system-wide gimprc:
# /etc/gimp/2.0/gimprc
# Most values can be set within GIMP by changing some options in the
# Preferences dialog.
(default-image
(width 1024)
(height 768)
(unit pixels)
(xresolution 72.000000)
(yresolution 72.000000)
(resolution-unit inches)
(image-type rgb)
(fill-type background-fill)
(comment "Created with GIMP"))
(monitor-xresolution 86.000000)
(monitor-yresolution 86.000000)
(save-tool-options yes)
(save-accels no)
(toolbox-wilber no)
(theme "Smaller")
(help-browser web-browser)
(toolbox-window-hint normal)
(dock-window-hint normal)
# end of gimprc

By adding "(toolbox-wilber no)" you can save a little extra space at the top of the Toolbox by removing the probing eyes.


Below are extracts from the Gimp's online manual

Dialogs and Docking: "GIMP has great flexibility for arranging dialog windows on your screen. Instead of placing each dialog in its own window, you can group dialogs using docks. A 'dock' is a container window that can hold a collection of persistent dialogs, such as the Tool Options dialog, Brushes dialog, Palette dialog, etc. Docks cannot, however, hold non-persistent dialogs such as the Preferences dialog or an Image window.

When free space starts to shrink - you can either erase some files, or compress them or archive them on cd, dvd - or use fslint (Author: Padraig Brady) - a very cool tool (for Linux) that will scan your hd and track duplicate files.

I was a bit suspicious before using this tool - because usually I know where my files are etc ... but I decide to make a test with my external HD (used for backups)

To make the test more interesting I noted the free space before launching fslint and it shows 8.1 GB free.


The search process is pretty long, checking all the files with various methods - to make sure there are really duplicates files.

It took around 20-30 mn in my example.








When all "duplicate files" are finally displayed - you can delete extra files, right click and open them - to have a look, save the list of duplicate files and ... the cool feature "Merge" them - which mean fslint will keep multiple version of the same files - but hardlink them - so the space is used only once.


Tip : Now the funny thing with Merge is that the feature is a bit counter intuitive - because if you select 2 files to be "Merged" - these 2 files will actually be excluded for the Merge ... so make sure you toggle your selection before "Merging"









Result is pretty impressive, after "Merging" all my duplicates - see below my Free space jumped to almost 19GB (remember I had only 8GB to begin with) - pretty cool stuff!


You can find other reviews for fslint here and there.