Tech Spot

Linux Mint is a great variation of Ubuntu. I have mainly used the xfce flavor because I wanted something lightweight to run on my old laptops. I had tried other distributions like Puppy Linux and Lubuntu but they didn't seem polished enough. I admit I have not tried Lubuntu in awhile so it may have improved. With all that comes pre-configured with Linux Mint, I still find I am always looking for that special custom theme or other software to improve my experience. Here's a list: System: Hardinfo for System Information (kind of like Windows Device Manager) Menu/Theme/Appearance: Out-of-the-box Kokodi theme with the Xfce-dusk Appearance setting makes a very pleasing, well contrasting dark look (see screenshot below). There are also good custom xfce themes like DarkCold (highly readable dark theme) Update 9/19/16: My new favorite dark settings use the LiNsta-Black-Plastic xfwm4 theme with the Adwaita-Dark gtk-2.0 appearance.  It actually provides a contrasting b

I have run Windows XP in Virtualbox for years.  Very stable, with decent performance. It is paradoxical that Linux guests with the same settings run very slowly, with choppy graphics performance.  So I looked at the usual suspects, such as the vbox Guest Additions, BIOS/hardware virtualization settings, etc.  I've read tricks like enabling (and some have recommended disabling) 3D acceleration even for non-graphical usage.  Trying various recommendations, a 64-bit Linux Mint (Rebecca 17.1) XFCE guest with 768 MB RAM and 128 MB vRAM was still running like molasses. The solution in my case?  Increasing the CPU from 1 to 2 (something I have not had to do with my Windows XP guest), made a world of difference. The suggestion was buried in this thread:  http://askubuntu.com/questions/287863/why-is-my-perfomance-too-bad-in-virtual-box