I'd recommend Mint - Ubuntu with a shiny finish (and in 11 running Gnome 
2). The only thing I'm not sure about is encrypting home dir (but I'm 
pretty certain you can).
Cheers
Bryn
On 29/10/11 00:58, Imran Chaudhry wrote:
> Can anyone recommend a good Linux distro that meets the following 
> requirements:
>
>   * must work easily with a Huwei 3G dongle
>   * Gnome 2.x
>   * easy to set-up encrypted home dir
>   * makes good use of a modern laptop (eg. usable webcam)
>
> I have been living with Ubunty 11.10 & Unity for the last two weeks 
> and while it has eye-candy, usability and much promise, I found it 
> hard to be efficient with it compared to Gnome 2 (especially where one 
> has multiple terminal windows). My conclusion is that it is not suited 
> for technical users. One can login with "Gnome Classic" but for some 
> reason the menu and icons look rather odd and I did not have the 
> patience to fix it. I really hope 12.04 maintains Gnome 2.x as 10.04. 
> I did try Gnome 3 but discarded it as it was not as "obvious" to use 
> as the alternatives.
>
> Right now I'm using Windows 7 dual-boot. My next steps were trying 
> Debian Squeeze (simple and does the job, not flashy, I have concerns 
> of older drivers and software here and not getting the most out of the 
> hardware). Arch Linux looks interesting also.
>
> The laptop is a Dell Latitude E6410.
>
> While I am here, has anyone done a dual-boot Windows and Linux with 
> encrypted home dir or partition on both? I want to use Truecrypt for 
> Windows but this would overwrite grub and I found one blog post 
> describing a workaround with some hairy commands.
>
> thanks!
>
> -- 
> GPG Key fingerprint = B323 477E F6AB 4181 9C65  F637 BC5F 7FCC 9CC9 CC7F
>
> "Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live 
> forever." - Indian political and spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi 
> (1869-1948)
>
>
> --
> Please post to: Hampshire@???
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> LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk
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Please post to: Hampshire@???
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