Thursday 2 March 2017

Gigabyte BRiX BACE-3150 OS Choice PLUS Micro SD is working in Mint 17.3 and 18.1

Wow!  it has been an interesting week with the BRiX BACE-3150.

I changed operating systems several times and came to the conclusion that in Mint 18.1,  Plasma 5.x is useless on the BRiX, XFCE is not much better and Cinnamon works well, but without my 'different wallpapers on each workspace'.



The best performer in Mint 18.1 was defintely Cinnamon although once I found and enabled an extension to allow me to change workspaces by scrolling the mousewheel on the desktop, I started to get the off mouse cursor artefact left on the screen for a few bried moments.

Because I always have two root partitions on my drive, I am able to install a new Linux distribution without using VirtualBox and without messing up my original distro.

(Mint 17.3 KDE with kernel 4.8)

That meant it was easy to drop back into Mint 17.3 and look seriously at any advantages I saw in Mint 18.1, and honestly, there was only one.

The BRiX has a built in Micro SD card reader that didn;t work in Mint 17.1 or 17.3, but it was working in Mint 18.1.  So I checked the Kernel.


So just out of curiosity I installed a later kernel in Mint 17.3 using the following commands in Terminal.


cd /tmp; wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.8/linux-headers-4.8.0-040800_4.8.0-040800.201610022031_all.deb http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.8/linux-headers-4.8.0-040800-generic_4.8.0-040800.201610022031_amd64.deb http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.8/linux-image-4.8.0-040800-generic_4.8.0-040800.201610022031_amd64.deb; sudo dpkg -i *.deb
sudo update-grub
After a reboot, this is the kernel I now have in Mint 17.3 KDE.
And a quick check of Dolphin shows the Micro SD card mounting, opening and unmounting perfectly
The next task, once it was tested was to use Grub Customizer to rearrange the menu entries.
The last to steps are to Save, and then Write the image to
the Master Boot Record, in my case on /dev/sda
So these few days have achieved something. I know not to waste my time
on Mint 18.1 KDE or indeed any KDE with the New Plasma 5.x.
I found that XFCE has serious screen tearing issues, but only with text.
I found a workable alternative in Mint 18.1 Cinnamon although it still leaves
a lot to be desired.
My overall decision is that the best Linux to run on a Gigabyte BRiX BACE-3150
is Mint 17.3 KDE with the 4.8 kernel, which works great (so far) with the BRiX built in hardware.  

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