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Looking dapper
December 24, 2006 ( geek )
So, I finally took the plunge and continued the upgrade process on my Linux laptop. As background, I don't have the space or the time in any one place (since y2k, I've lived in 10 different places in 2 different states and 3 different countries!), so I own 2 laptops; one is a 2Ghz machine I run Win XPsp2 on, it's a Dell Inspiron that's caused me enough despair, and is heavy enough that I don't lug it around much, and the other is a 300mhz Dell Latitude CPi that is lightweight and low-power, and I drag it's indestructible box around everywhere (I've seen a similar CPx laptop be run over by an SUV and still boot - no screen, but everything else worked, even the touchpad!). The CPi has had a variety of Linux distros on it (it was bought with Win2k), and I've settled on (k)Ubuntu. Ubuntu is definitely too heavy for the thing, but it's the only debian-based distro I've found that has the right magic dust to work with the sound card. Every major DSL release I download a LiveCD and try it out, but not luck yet.
Anyway, it was stuck on Hoary Hedgehog for a while, but for a variety of reasons, most of which I'll admit center around usability, I finally brought it to Breezy Badger and this holiday season I've upped it to Dapper Drake. The move to Drake took for.ev.er - almost 24 hours, admittedly with a few very long waits for me to decide on overwriting config files as I walked away, went to sleep, etc.
However, it's happily purring along, with a few improvements that have been visible - the Synaptics touchpad drivers are better, and they feature a quick diasble-annoying-tapping option. Suspend has been amazingly improved, no more scary-screens, or instability (that I've noticed). It sucked a lot more of my HD usage, so I had to clean up some packages that have no business being on here (Celestia? Yeah, that'll work well with 300mhz and 128MB RAM!).
This is all in training to move whole-hog to Linux on my next computer purchase. I have zero interest in Vista, and while Mac is nice, it's a bit pricey. 'sides, I like this whole OSS thing.
Posted by griffjon at December 24, 2006 07:24 PM
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