![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
liam_on_linuxIt appears I am not a Real Man in yet another way. (Despite the new beard.) My attempts to resurrect my old Thinkpad i1200 series (one of the iffy ones made by Acer under licence) resulted in total failure to get either PC-BSD or Debian 5 running properly. (Or Lubuntu, Puppy or any Ubuntu after 6.06.)
PC-BSD 8.1 uses KDE 4.5 which looks a bit nicer than previous KDE 4 iterations, but it's too much for a P3-750 with 320MB of RAM. I got 7.1 working well, if slowly, but 8.1 did not initialise my Xircom Realport Ethernet card and it didn't show in the GUI. No Internet connection means no use at all in this day and age.
Debian 5 went on fine, but the screen res was wrong and unchangeable, and it didn't find my soundcard. My attempts to upgrade to testing or unstable completely b0rked the install, too.
But to my pleased surprise, Crunchbang 9.04 went on without a glitch. Had to hand-tweak xorg.conf to get the screen res up from 800*600 to 1024*768, but that also afforded me the chance to drop it from 24-bit colour to 16-bit colour for one speedup, then later to disable DRI for another, bigger speedup.
I'm just worried about the age of #! 9.04. There was no later release and the new version, based directly off Debian instead of Ubuntu, is still in alpha-test and has been since late June. Come on, guys, get with the program!
I also note that Linux Mint looks inclined to jump ship from Ubuntu to Debian, having just released the first edition of LMDE: Linux Mint Debian Edition. It's GNOME-based, so a bit much for the old Thinkpad, but I shall be giving that a whirl very soon.
Apparently, Ubuntu's single-minded quest to become as polished (and somewhat Mac-like) as possible is increasingly alienating people. It seems some of the tweaks are harder and harder for remixers to work around. (A trivial example of my own: there's no separate panel volume control any more; it's part of the new unified Indicator Applet, which also interacts with Empathy and Gwibber. But I don't like or use Empathy, preferring Pidgin, and barely use Gwibber. To paraphrase an old Frankie Goes To Hollywood T-shirt - MARKIE SAYS: TOUGH.)
PC-BSD 8.1 uses KDE 4.5 which looks a bit nicer than previous KDE 4 iterations, but it's too much for a P3-750 with 320MB of RAM. I got 7.1 working well, if slowly, but 8.1 did not initialise my Xircom Realport Ethernet card and it didn't show in the GUI. No Internet connection means no use at all in this day and age.
Debian 5 went on fine, but the screen res was wrong and unchangeable, and it didn't find my soundcard. My attempts to upgrade to testing or unstable completely b0rked the install, too.
But to my pleased surprise, Crunchbang 9.04 went on without a glitch. Had to hand-tweak xorg.conf to get the screen res up from 800*600 to 1024*768, but that also afforded me the chance to drop it from 24-bit colour to 16-bit colour for one speedup, then later to disable DRI for another, bigger speedup.
I'm just worried about the age of #! 9.04. There was no later release and the new version, based directly off Debian instead of Ubuntu, is still in alpha-test and has been since late June. Come on, guys, get with the program!
I also note that Linux Mint looks inclined to jump ship from Ubuntu to Debian, having just released the first edition of LMDE: Linux Mint Debian Edition. It's GNOME-based, so a bit much for the old Thinkpad, but I shall be giving that a whirl very soon.
Apparently, Ubuntu's single-minded quest to become as polished (and somewhat Mac-like) as possible is increasingly alienating people. It seems some of the tweaks are harder and harder for remixers to work around. (A trivial example of my own: there's no separate panel volume control any more; it's part of the new unified Indicator Applet, which also interacts with Empathy and Gwibber. But I don't like or use Empathy, preferring Pidgin, and barely use Gwibber. To paraphrase an old Frankie Goes To Hollywood T-shirt - MARKIE SAYS: TOUGH.)
