Job well done

Hi, I just signed up and thought I'd say what a great piece of work Zorin OS is. I was reluctant to try it because I hadn't even heard of it until a few days ago and I was getting disapointed in my Linux experience somewhat. I started using Ubuntu then went to Mint for a year now and while they've been usable there was always some weird thing going on.

Most of what I want it photo storage and archiving and painting with Gimp. I started with Natty and had video issues (lagging brushes, ghost spots, failure to focus on the open/save boxes, etc. I tried all the driver for my Nvidia card, then just the Nouveau, different shells but cliches remained. One thing was fixed and another popped up. Mint 11 was better, seemed more polished with fewer issues. So I got greedy and installed Mint 12. It had Wacom tablet support (yea) but at a price. In full gnome there were spikes in the brush strokes and a time lag. It worked fine in Classic-no effects, lost the ability to switch buttons on the stylus (an issue carried over in all the Ubuntu based distros). The bottom button should be the right click like it is in Windows and OS-X. The interface was very plain and clunky to me though and something went wrong with Mint 11.

So I decided to try Vorin OS and am very impressed. Natty never ran so good! The performance is noticeably better, there are no video artefacts or issues and I haven't loaded a driver. Gimp runs very fast on this OS as is. I made a small script file to switch the Wacom stylus button and all is well. I don't know how many users have one but the option would be nice to include.

Every distro also has carried over a bug for my Epson scanner. I learned a while back how to get it running by editing the dll.conf file in etc/sane.d and uncomment out the first epson reference and comment out the second (epson2). I don't know if that's hard to fix but a notice would probably help some newbies that couldn't hang in there for a solution.

Anyway, great job again. I telling everyone I know about Zorin OS!

And a hi from me too, and as Swarf said, if you have an how-to on the Epson printer front, feel free to post it as it could be of a great help to others!!. (This of course applies to any members that wish to contribute something to the forum!)

Welcome and enjoy the ride

Regards Wolfman

Hi Swarf,

no I wasn't but thanks for thinking of me!!.

Regards Wolfman

Hi guys, thanks for the welcome. I will post those two tips in the How To section soon when I'm on the Linux/XP machine, I'm on my Mac laptop now. I got busy with the Ubuntu 12.04 installation. So I currently have a quad boot setup. I had to also find out how to edit the grub file so Zorin OS was the default. I used the grub config tool so that made it easy once I knew what to do. I installed Precise Parawhatever for the simple reason that Gimp 2.8 is out and don't know if it will run with gnome 2 now or in the future. It's a major upgrade, 3.5 years in the making. 12.04 installed Gimp 2.6 instead so I was in too much of a hurry I guess.

That said...I can appreciate Zorin OS 5 even more now! What in Hades are they thinking at Canonical? That Unity layout would only be good on a tablet or phone. I thought there would be a classic option, but nope. The 2D looks the same. I hope Zorin doesn't go that route in v6.

I will say that they have improved the performance, Gimp is running fast, painting with pressure sensitivity enabled is a key indicator from my experience. It was a no go with Mint 11 & 12 in full gnome mode. Way too choppy, with occasional spikes. All that is fixed in this release, along with full Wacom support. But I'm hoping to run Gimp 2.8 in Zorin instead.

Hi jasper,

if you ever have problems with GRUB, see this how-to and create a bootable CD:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1895

It has served me well on several occassions!!

Regards Wolfman