For a Linux workstation installation, a novice user would choose a well-supported distribution like Ubuntu or Fedora, wouldn’t he? It seems that the authors of this book recognize this, and in chapter 1 they suggest that by basing their offering on the Ubuntu distribution, Mint developers have been able to concentrate their efforts on adding new features. In particular, they’ve developed the Cinnamon and MATE desktops as replacements for Ubuntu’s Unity desktop.

Those who found difficulty with Unity have been able to use instead the Xfce, Gnome Classic, or Gnome desktops available in most well-supported distributions. Xfce in particular can be made to look similar to either of the Mint-developed desktops. So I wondered why anyone would want to use a Mint desktop. I decided to follow the book’s instructions for installing Mint and check it out for myself.

A brief summary of the available Mint desktop environments (Cinnamon, KDE, MATE, and Xfce) is provided, and it is suggested that new users should install either the 32-bit (for low-memory machines) or 64-bit Cinnamon edition. Instructions are provided for creating bootable live and installation media, and a simple partitioning scheme with primary root, swap, and home areas is illustrated in a sequence of screen shots. Additional screen shots are used to illustrate the few remaining steps in installation.

In the chapter entitled “Getting Acquainted with Cinnamon,” the reader can learn about logging in, launching programs, utilizing workspaces, managing files, and changing Cinnamon settings. I found this both informative and easy to read. I had a slight problem with the description of the “hot corner” facility; it took me awhile to figure out that this is not actually enabled by default in recent Mint releases.

There is a short chapter that introduces simple command-line operations; it doesn’t go much beyond ls, find, man, and nano, but the concepts here will assist readers in understanding some of the system management commands shown in later chapters.

There’s another short chapter about utilizing storage and media. It illustrates how media can be formatted, mounted, and written. The graphical tool for writing bootable images direct to memory sticks is also discussed, and there’s a brief explanation of universally unique identifier (UUID) concepts.

For graphical software management, Linux Mint offers both the Mint Software Manager and the more traditional Synaptic tool. Screen shots show how both of these can be used, together with some command-line software management examples.

Most workstation users will want to perform multimedia activities, so the book summarizes the issues surrounding codecs, and then provides screen shots showing how to play audio files, video files, and DVDs using standard Linux Mint applications. Webcam usage and image editing are also covered. I was, however, unable to find any detail here about using office applications.

There is a chapter about user management and file access permissions. Both graphical and command-line methods are shown, and the consequences of modifying file and directory permissions are explored with some useful examples. Configuration and usage of the sudo command is also covered in this chapter.

If you’re going to browse the web or access external storage resources, you’ll need to appropriately configure your network access, and the book illustrates how you can set up both wired network and wireless connections. It also shows how the user can set up secure-shell, file transfer protocol (FTP), Samba, and network file system (NFS) arrangements.

There are a couple of chapters about security (using iptables and ClamAV) and more advanced administration (with cron and email examples). The latter chapter suggests that one can only upgrade Linux Mint to a newer version by performing a complete reinstallation, and then goes into some detail about how this can be done; my understanding is that release 17 (which was released about the time this book was published) will be upgradeable in place.

Novice users may find that the last chapter, “Troubleshooting Linux Mint,” is the most useful one. It presents a well-chosen range of scenarios, like boot problems, memory faults, and network issues, together with steps that may be undertaken to accomplish resolution.

Those who want to use the MATE or KDE editions of Linux Mint can find in the appendices some details about how the desktop layouts and preferred applications differ from those that come with the Cinnamon edition.

This is an excellent book for novice users who really want to use a Linux Mint Cinnamon workstation. There’s no confusing stuff like volume management or RAID configurations, yet the level of coverage is sufficient to get a user out of trouble when something goes wrong.

More reviews about this item: Amazon, Goodreads