Final analysis: Linux Laptop
Ok, here’s the final rundown of the Linux Laptop Project:
Distro: Slackware 10.1, kernel 2.6.10
I started with SuSE 9.2 as an experiment, and was promptly dumped into RPM hell. Bleah. Suse is a good learner distro as a step up from Mandrake, but they do funky things with it. I would happily give it to my boss and use it for work, but not at home where I like things just so. Kernel choice was to keep current. 2.4.29 is stable, but has too much stuff crammed into it to make other stuff work. 2.6.10 runs smoother. (I no longer have to reseat the wifi card after coming back from standby.)
Window Manager: KDE
Like there was really another choice. Okay, there’s lots of other choices (this is Linux, after all,) but I have been a KDE user since 1.0 and just can’t break away from it.
Internet connection: Orinoco wifi
The D-Link got better signal strength in Windoze, but it came down to the fact that I could get this one working and not the DWL650. Win some, lose some.
Usability: Good
What, only good? The fact remains, this is a PIII with only 128 megs of RAM, when I’m used to having an Athlon XP2400+ with 512 megs RAM. I could speed things up a bit by using a different window manager, but I’m tolerant of certain things. It is running a bit faster than it did under Win2k, but not by an amount significant enough to brag about. (Bragging rights are reserved for the P4 / 1GB box at work.) Security, though is a slam-dunk.
Quirks remaining: 2 or three, nothing serious.
On boot, I have to stop the wifi card and reseat it for some reason; I’m sure I could get to the bottom of if I cared that much about it. One of the reasons I stuffed Slack into this thing is to get away from the multitude of reboots necessary under windoze. There are also some minor issues playing back video, and I need to get the power-management tweaked in. Like I said, no biggie.
Am I happy with it? Yes. Could it be better? Of course. But then again, it was free. :)
Hollerings