Mint 19 is new - the laptop is 10+ years old (Twin Turion, 3G ram, Broadcom wifi RS690 (awful) graphics.

Cinnamon crashes 100% of the time. Modesetting, & Radeon driver are all happening (good) but it's throwing in Vesa & fbdev as well (Not good). Where can I disable that? I'm new to Wayland.

Wifi is another issue. The kernel config has
CONFIG_B43=y
CONFIG_B43_BUSES_BCMA_AND_SSB=y
# CONFIG_B43_BUSES_SSB is not set

The SSB (Sonics Silicon Backplane - I don't know either) stuff seems otherwise OK but the firmware is lacking. Apparently, they never tried a b43xx card.
I'll manage firmware, nut rebuilding a kernel is pretty pointless as they're so regularly updated. And where's wpa_supplicant.conf to set the WPA key?

EDIT: Firmware got the Broadcom Wifi up & recognised. Still no connection, and there's an open network (my 'guess access') atm. Don't have resource worries yet despite just 3G ram. I gather Cinnamon is resource hungry. XFCE?

The big remaining issues are "Fallback Mode" in X, & getting the wifi going.

Depending on how old the laptop is (ca. 2007-2010), Mint MATE might be a good idea. It kinda looks like Cinnamon, but uses much less RAM.

To add Mint's XFCE or MATE to your machine such that you can choose XFCE or MATE over Cinnamon at boot time, type:

sudo apt-get install mint-meta-xfce

or sudo apt-get install mint-meta-mate

You're getting Fallback mode because Cinnamon requires accelerated graphics rendering in your graphics card, and if you're graphic drivers aren't acting right or predate the "Vista Ready" sticker (or a Vista/7 or later sticker), it's going to use a software renderer that strains your CPU. Most of the computers that are old enough to require the software renderer also have old, slow CPUs, making the problem exponentially worse.

You can install as many desktop environments as you wish, given you have enough space on the / filesystem.

When did your wireless card last work correctly - on another distro maybe?

Software rendering sounds about right. I need the kernel module, and the standard Mesa driver. Then it should go (as much as it ever does). It can't even keep speech in sync on a full screen video :-((.
The card has no vertex shader, whatever that is, but graphics heads view that as a problem. It seems to load the right stuff, then the crap. If I could stop it loading vesa & fbdev, I'd probably be fine.

I'll ditch Cinnamon for xfce or Mate. Which is lighter? XFCE I know my way around; I'll try Mate.

Wifi worked last week with Slackware-14.1. I think the 4312 binaries were dropped from the kernel firmware, but I kept a tar of the Slackware firmware :-D. I'm just after getting online here by setting up in X, so we can consider that the ancient firmware sorted it.
Let's hope it remembers the settings.

EDIT: I did an 'apt-get update' & upgrade, and it exposed 2 things
1. dpkg objects to the extra firmware and spews an error installing it's own firmware
2. I have 100M (About 83 Megs of space) for boot, and the initrd is taking over half of it (56M) so it can't make a second. How can I trim the initrd it automatically makes up? My setup is
sda1 = Vista
sda2 = boot
sda3 = swap
sda4 = extended

So anything added to /boot will have to come out of swap :-(.

I might be tempted to try different newish distro's for testing.

3G may not need swap.

Can add in usb or almost any accessible space to add to swap. Swapfile may help if you want to manage it often.

Usually easy to add in broadcom drivers. Almost everyone has to.

At the question about the lighter DE, XFCE is a little lighter.

But yeah, you can create a swapfile and throw it into fstab if needbe to get more boot space.

Also, although you've probably heard it before, Vista was EOL'd last year

Actually posting from this crummy HP Laptop in Cinnamon, so there's progress!

Solved the boot problem this way. I thought "Who needs a 100M boot partition?" I remounted it in /opt, copied the contents to /boot (the directory on /), commented it out in /etc/fstab and rebooted. All happy. It has space now.

Then I repeated the apt-get update & upgrade and piped the screen errors to a logfile to save them running off screen. This is the output
My gut instinct is to ignore this Warning and hope it will go away :-/. I'd love to drastically trim the ramdisk. It's loading drivers for raid and LVM. And if I ever need drive space, I have a blank partition for /opt. Partitioning took into account a 15G package from Xilinx for FPGA software with a simulator which I wanted for home and University THEN, but not now, when I'm qualified and disabled.

Yes, Vista is EOL, but do I care? My only option is Windows 10, which takes over 40G in a VM (basically bare install) vs 26G (populated) for Vista. You'll probably think me mad for saying this, but I actually prefer the Vista interface to windows 10, once you neuter the most irritating aspects. I've only a 64G NTFS partition.

Also, I've installed Mate as per instructions (sudo apt-get install mint-meta-mate) but it doesn't show in the menu. What's the grub syntax to tell it to think it out again?

business_kid,

I know you have marked this as SOLVED, but for the benefit of others visiting this thread later, I would suggest looking at post #2 on:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...em-4175625807/


Log out (not Quit) of the Cinnamon desktop environment and log in again.

Click on the gearwheel/cog in the top right corner (see attached screenshot) and select MATE.

Attached Images