I don’t know why I had never come across this before, but as an incredibly handy shortcut to open a new terminal window, use: Ctrl-Alt-T
This works on Ubuntu and derivatives, like Mint (is this a common Linux shortcut for all distros?)
Installing Nvidia drivers on Linux Mint 17.1
Booting the Mint Live DVD on a HP Pavilion with an AMD Phenom quadcore, I get to the desktop but it starts lagging, and is barely responsive. Selecting the compatibility mode boot option gets me to a lower res desktop but without the lagging issue. After I installed to my hd using compatibility mode, when booting up for the first time I ran into exactly the same issue.
At the Grub menu, if I edit the boot option and add nomodeset, then again, I can boot into a low res with no lag. This desktop has a Nvidia graphics card, so I tried following the instructions here, but I couldn’t get these steps to work, every time I ran the Nvidia installer, it kept telling me that the nouveau drivers were still loaded.
This page suggested to install via ‘sudo apt-get install nvidia-304’ – this approach seemed to download all the deps, build local, install, setup and configure, all in one go. When I rebooted, all looked good, and no need to manually add the nomodeset at the grub menu. Success! So far very impressed with the slickness of the Mint Cinnamon desktop!