I am checking out Mint LMDE (32 and 64 bit) as an alternative to running straight debian, but smxi must form part of the equation. As you have pointed out elsewhere, network manager is the first fly in the ointment, and my experience so far is that getting rid of it and the various dross that it leaves behind is a problem for non-geeks like me. I have managed to eventually get ceni and wicd working after various attempts to aptitude remove --purge and manually removing directories/files, and reboots, but never managed to figure out what I had done in a documentable way. I decided to do another install and try to figure out what had to be done but got in a mess, with no connection at one point and again, lost the thread of what I had done. I did get ceni to work though, and tried out the runlevel tool, which worked great.

One problem I have with squeeze is I still get horizontal interference lines with the debian kernel ( bug reported). The liquorix kernels work well in that respect but the only liquorix kernel that does not have other problems (reboots or hangs on resume from suspend) is 2.6.34 and I am having problems installing it on my new 64 bit install. I am getting the following message:

I suspect it is something I have done wrong, and i have googled this with no result. Any ideas?
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OK, well I have had another go at 64bit, and tried installing liquorix 2.6.36, which installed ok, but will not resume from suspend. It reboots instead. Anyway, I tried liquorix 2.6.34 again and this time it too installed, but would not run with the radeon driver, just gave a screen with lots of stripes. So I guess I will try fglrx and see how that goes.

Edit: Finally found a 64 bit combination that is working perfectly (so far) on this laptop, and that is liquorix 2.6.34 and fglrx 10.11. Suspend and resume work properly and wifi reconnects (using ceni). This is the first time I have got squeeze/mint lmde to work properly on this machine since the middle of 2010.
Hope this might be useful to anyone who has the same video card.
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Have you tried 2.6.37 kernel yet? if you have a spare HD why not swap it so you won't lose that install you got working so you can test with newer kernels and such
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Hi DeepDayze, have not tried 2.6.37 yet. The last combo I tried is still working fine, so I will stick with it for now for my production os. I have settled on lmde and changed sources.lst to squeeze so that I will have Stable rather than Testing for my production install, once Squeeze goes stable. I usually have 2 debian partitions at any one time, similar to what you are suggesting, so if something bad happens to my production install, I can use my testbed as an instant backup os while I figure out what went wrong with the other one. When I get around to it, I will start running Testing or maybe Sid as my testbed and try out 2.6.37.

I do like the lmde concept. It is so fast to install compared to installing straight debian and although there is some stuff I dont need, it makes up for that by including stuff I do need and being so polished. Much easier/faster for installing for other folks too. Once network manager has been replaced and the runlevels changed, I can't fault it so far. Except maybe I think Clem should go for Stable rather Testing for the default, and have a notification come up about how to run it as Testing or Sid at your own risk. I know some people are finding Testing very stable, but on this machine, it has been a nightmare for the last year or so with constant breakages in the graphics and suspend areas.
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