Linux Mint 4.0 KDE Daryna

OK, today I had intended to try to see if I could encourage Mandriva 2008 to boot from the Seagate ext drive to my MacBook with the only thing I could think of trying was to increase the "sleep" function in mkinitrd from the default 8 to 20 seconds.
Honestly, I'm not at all confident this is going to do the trick. Other than that it might just be that some usb drivers are missing from the kernel. Might look at this soon.

I also tried to see if the dell 9200 would allow me to install WinXP (modified for usb support) to an external drive. However, once again I get the same BSoD I got on the E520.
The Stop: error (0x000007b) seems to be attributable to a number of things but the most likely here is that the usb drivers are missing and the installer sees a HDD it cannot install to.
However, I had though that the ngine hack had got over this but apparently not.The next thing to try might be to try to get the drivers for the Seagate ext drive and pt them on floppy and use F6 during the install to install these.

Anyway, I decided to try Linux Mint -- new version 4.0 Daryna (still in Beta) with KDE.
This is a 1 GB download which I put on DVD. Thereafter, absolutely everything went extremely well.
Installation was very quick (~10 mins) and getting it to boot from the Seagate was totally straightforward -- worked first time.

Compiz-fusion is already installed but its default settings are such that wobbly windows and cube rotation are disabled by default. So you have to go into ccsm to make changes before you see anything.
Also, the fusion-icon is not included but you can get that very easily from here

Madwifi I installed from the Ubuntu MacBook wiki and again this worked first time.

Then I got AWN installed very easily from here.

All-in-all a very pleasant first-time experience with Linux Mint.