Using Linux Mint

Linux Mint 10 KDE Julia proved to be much more stable that Kubuntu 10.10, however, after about week or so of running, it would either freeze or get so sluggish that it was unusable.  This appeared to occur when memory usage got up over 85% or more.  I suspected the problem was due to problems in Linux when using swap space.  After adding another 4 GB to the component to bring the total to 8 GB, Mint 10 was rock solid, at times running over a month with no issues.

Mint 10 KDE was a good platform and the CUDA SDK (version 4.0) worked on this system.  CUDA was not needed for this project, but is needed for a work project, the reason for going to Linux in the first place (which was also required).  Mint 12 KDE Lisa (based on Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot) was released (there was no Linux Mint 11 KDE Katja).  I installed Mint 12, but there were a number of issues.  Since I made the system dual boot (or should say multiple boot because the original Windows XP system and even the Kubuntu 10.10 install was still available), I just went back to Mint 10 as it was stable and met my needs.

However, sometime early last spring when the then next version of Firefox and Thunderbird was released, I thought it strange after many weeks the new versions were not showing up in the repositories.  When I investigated, I learned that Mint 10 was at end-of-life (meaning no more updates).  So it was time to move to Mint 12.  Some time was spent getting Mint 12 working they way Mint 10 was.

The biggest issue was with CUDA development.  CUDA SDK 4.0 specifically supported Ubuntu 10.10 (and Mint 10).  The new CUDA SDK 4.2 only supported Ubuntu 11.04 (and 10.04), but not 11.10.  There were a number of catch 22 issues.  First was that CUDA SDK 4.2 required GCC 4.6 (11.10 came with 4.6, so good), however, it also required NVIDIA drivers of 295.41+.  I installed 295.40, but Mint 12 was unstable with this version.  I also tried 295.41 and 295.49 with the same instability.  I prefer to only use the driver version in the repositories because using the ones downloaded from NVIDIA are a pain to install and uninstall.

Eventually I forced it back to 280.13, which made the system stable again and didn't try any of the later versions that were available.  Since CUDA SDK 4.2 couldn't be used, I had to go back to CUDA SDK 4.0 (4.1 had the same requirements as 4.2), which would work with 280.13 (270.41+ required).  However, it would not work with GCC 4.6.  To resolve this, the gcc-4.4 packages were installed and the system was set to use these (and scripts were created to easily change back and forth as GCC 4.5+ was needed for IBCP).

Mint 12 proved to be as stable and Mint 10.  I then needed to upgrade to a newer video card with 2 GB of memory (the GTS 450 only had 1 GB), again for my CUDA development.  I selected a Zotac GTX 660 Ti card as this was the most powerful card that would fit in my case.  The GTS 450 at around 8.5 inches in length barely fit, and in fact one of the hard drives had to be removed from the hard drive cage (this hard drive was laid loose at the bottom of the case).  The Zotac card was only 7.5 inches and is the only 660 Ti card this size, the rest currently available are around 10 inches long (along with the 670, 680, etc. cards).

The next problem was that the 660 Ti requires NVIDIA driver version of 304.51 (the latest).  This version was available and so was installed on Mint 12, but there were again graphics problems.  It seemed that only 280.13 was stable on Mint 12 (on my system anyway).  I also could not get either CUDA SDK 4.0 or 4.2 to work right.  Both would compile programs (using the correct GCC version for each), but the programs would not run correctly.  The GTS 450 was still in the system as I wanted to make the system was stable before installing the GTX 660 Ti.

Mint 13 KDE Maya had been released around May (based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin), so it was time to install this version.  Fortunately notes were taken with Mint 12 on all the items needed to get the system to work for all of my needs.  So Mint 13 was installed using my notes, which mostly worked flawlessly, though some of the notes were updated slightly.  The 304.51 drivers were then installed and everything was stable.  Also, programs built using CUDA SDK 4.2 worked correctly.  So now I am using Mint 13.  This is an LTS (Long Term Support) release and will supported for 5 years.

Now on to accessing the IBCP git repository and building the program...