Comments on: Meanwhile. …

By: johnraff

johnraff — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 16:40:23 +0000

Just for the record:
on my testbed 1998 Toshiba laptop (266MHz Celeron, 192MB RAM) cli Intrepid + Xfce (not xubuntu) seems to be working quite nicely.
Xfce is certainly prettier than Openbox was on Gutsy (though maybe some improved graphic rendering libraries or something in Intrepid?) and doesn’t seem to be all that much slower.

There were a couple of small issues to fix – getting the right screen resolution required pasting in some lines from my previous xorg.conf file, the PolicyKit stuff had to be adjusted to enable mounting of usb sticks, and apt-get fetches recommends by default – but now everything seems to be OK.

By: johnraff

johnraff — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 02:53:01 +0000

Thanks – I’ll try Intrepid for now.
Arch looks good but I’ll have to study up a bit first.
Yes, having got used to the convenience of apt-get the Debian world feels kind of cozy…

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:07:26 +0000

No, and I admit a bit of laziness when it comes to those kernel freezes. I’ve seen threads about them before but couldn’t duplicate them until now. And even so, the only common characteristic is that they occur after the machine has been running for a day or so, and it’s a complete lockup — so I have no practical way of troubleshooting it. Add to that it’s happening on a machine with an LCD that’s 3/4 shattered, and it’s probably easy to see why I’m not quite “driven” to figure it out.

And Arch is working fine. It’s been up for about four days now without a problem. I really think this is unique to specific hardware arrangements; I’ve been using Hardy on literally dozens of installations over the past six months and this is the first time it’s been an issue. So I blame the machine more than the software.

All that being said, if you can’t put Arch on that machine and you want something Debianesque, I’d go with Intrepid unless you’re really worried about lockups. If they happen, drop back to Hardy, and if they happen there too, drop back to Gutsy again. If you’re just running CLI+ stuff, I don’t think one particular release is overwhelmingly better than another.

By: johnraff

johnraff — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:05:12 +0000

btw just how worrisome are those Hardy freezes? I haven’t found any posting suggesting the problem has been fixed as yet… Just as I was thinking of cleaning off this system which has been dist-upgraded step by step from Breezy to Gutsy (presumably collecting a fair bit of detritus on the way) and putting in a clean install of the LTS supposedly stable Hardy!

For a mediumweight cli install + xorg + xfce (or openbox) type setup would you (or anyone reading this) recommend:
*)installing Hardy anyway?
*)sticking with Gutsy for now?
*)jumping to Intrepid?
*)installing Debian Etch, or some other distro?

Advice appreciated!

By: devnet

devnet — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:43:15 +0000

Sounds like an excellent time to switch to TinyME

By: Josh

Josh — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:19:48 +0000

I have a NEC Versa P/75 laptop that I adore. Eventually I’ll max it out to 40mb of ram from the 24mb I’m at right now. I’ve run a very slim Debian Sarge install on it before with X and wifi without issues. That hdd died, haven’t used it with Linux since then… You have inspired me to fire it back up

btw, you may want to nab a Versa. The P series has an 800x600x16bit LCD, max 40mb ram, two PCMCIA slots, a “versa bay”. The versa bay can take two more PCMCIA slots, a floppy drive, another battery, etc. Plus the laptop has a trackball in the most awesome spot ever. The front edge of the case below the keyboard. I deal with the slowness just because of how awesome the hardware is