[SOLVED] Additional Software availability LL vs. Mint

[gold_finger]

Regarding the glitch, I'm just guessing...
Maybe it was just busy completing the previous installs in the background,
even though it appeared outwardly to be complete and ready.?

No.  It wasn't anything like that.  Problem with pop-up acting like it was not excepting my password happened immediately after hitting the install button (before it started doing anything).  Weird part was that it kept popping up password box with message to the effect I'm not authorized to carry out procedure, bad password, or something like that.  (Can't remember exactly because I was tired and not paying close attention at first.)  After a few repeated tries entering password, I figured the software manager program was screwed-up and I tried closing.  Hit the "x" on the window to close it several times, but nothing happened.  Then after about 30 seconds the program finally closed and that's when I noticed the network activity and waited until I thought everything completed.

There is a possibility that the laptop itself was the problem and not the software manager.  The laptop is one I inherited from a friend when they got themselves a new one a couple of years ago.  It has always been tempermental and has some sort of physical problem with the graphics card and possibly a sound card issue to.  It experiences periodic boot problems, interface freezing problems during operation (with and without proprietary NVidea driver and with or without compositing set), and crashes every once in a while.  I know those things are related to the physical hardware -- not the OS.  I only use the machine to run test OS installs and things like I'm doing now.  It's not a computer I "need", so don't really care to waste any money fixing the problems.  Long story short -- it's possible that the computer itself was on the verge of crashing/freezing up when I was in the middle of carrying out my test install and that might be why it acted so strange.  Going to try running more tests on the other machine (the old desktop) to see if I can trigger same weird behavior from software manager.