Laptop (un)love
July 26, 2006 – 10:55 pmThe epic story of failing computer hardware which has come into my hands is surely as depressing as ever. I’ve sent my motherboard back to the vendor, to be checked and replaced if necessary. Warranty expires in another 2 weeks, *phew*. If the motherboard comes back clean, I’ll have to send in the RAM.
I knew I would be without my pc for a little while, so I decided to update the laptop’s kernel, and stay fresh with all things kde related. My distro of choice is arch - a trustworthy, handrolled, bleeding edge release, which is easy to maintain, especially to update and super fast. Unfortunately, leaving such a distro stagnant without updating causes havoc when bringing it up to speed. My biggest problem, by far, was troubleshooting the madwifi drivers for my atheros based wifi card. With kernel updates, and my own custom built modules, nothing worked.
I spent three days trying to fix it, playing with modprobe and all those fun games. So much frustration caused me to boot into the kubuntu livecd and simply overwrite the partitions with it. I’ve been quite impressed with kubuntu, especially the way which it sparkles and glitters. I loved the fade in splash :). It recognised my wifi card immediately, but having to use sudo for every command is irritating me. Oh well. Apt worked well too, but it still isn’t anywhere near as awesome as pacman is for arch. It was a breeze to install suse’s knetworkmanager, which is just great. Use it, if you have a wireless network. I suppose with all good and polished things come the downsides too, unfortunately. I have found kubuntu too slow to be able to use. Keep in mind that I need every bit of fast when using my 700mhz laptop, and all the functionality which is loaded comes at a price. Perhaps I haven’t found the best way to streamline the distro, but unless I can get it to a comparable speed to arch, I’ll probably have to return to my favourite type of i686 optimised packages: handrolled to perfection.
5 Responses to “Laptop (un)love”
sudo su
I had a similar experience - got tired of having an unmaintained gentoo on my laptop, and added kubuntu - loved how it automagically picked up on everything. 
I have features working that I didn’t even know my laptop had. only pesky things are that horizontal scroll didn’t magically work, and even though wifi works, the pretty LED doesn’t blink.
I haven’t really noticed any speed problem, but I haven’t been using it for long yet - on my friend’s comp kubuntu absolutely crawls.
By chani on Jul 26, 2006
I’ve also had the same experience!
I used gentoo for a while until I got fed up with compiling everything whenever there is a small one line fix or a version update. kubuntu and ubuntu have served me well for a long time now. I have had kubuntu at home for about a year now and kubuntu/ubuntu at work for half a year. I haven’t had any problems, and running xgl has quadrupled my productivity when working on websites!
By Vladislav on Jul 27, 2006
I have kubuntu on my laptop, do
sudo passwd
and you can make a root passwd, thus avoiding the need for sudo continually.
By Max Howell on Jul 27, 2006
have you tried pclinuxos? it’s the distro-hopper-stopper and since using it i have been more than delighted with my linux experience. i haven’t had so much computing fun in years - rock-solid and still beta. i use the minime for remastering and no longer bother with any other distro. updating with synaptic is a breeze. i’ve only had it since february 2006 and i’m in love with it.
apart from http://www.reallylinux.com, they are the friendliest bunch of folk i have met, in the fora and on irc.
come visit.
By jaydot on Jul 30, 2006