Which Ubuntu? (or CentOS ...)

I've had time to think about it. I'm ready to pull Debian off of the $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) and replace it with Ubuntu. I could go with Xubuntu, as I have in the past, but since Ubuntu runs so well on it, I might stick with the mainline product.

I thought I'd go with Ubuntu 6.06 LTS because it appears to run well and will carry me to the next Ubuntu LTS (set for release in April of this year) and beyond if I wish.

I already have Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 on the drive, and I'm going to keep it for awhile. It's the first Slackware-based, Xfce-focused distribution that has installed and run without flaws -- so far, anyway.

But with a few hours of sleep behind me, I wonder if I shouldn't give Ubuntu 7.10 another try. Sure, I lost two installations of it to unknown, process-slowing problems, but maybe a "virgin" installation of 7.10 will behave better.

At this point, it all comes down to drivers. The PCMCIA slot on the Gateway is hopelessly broken -- the pins are bent (a screw was lodged in there at one point). I can get the replacement part, but will I be able to do the work and replace the PCMCIA cage assembly? I can barely get the two halves of the laptop apart -- there's still a hidden screw somewhere keeping me from complete access to the parts inside.

But if I did manage to get PCMCIA going, that would mean I could use a PCMCIA wireless card. Of course, I still have one of the two USB ports working. On one of the USB inputs, the plastic piece cracked and fell out. I have the broken piece, but getting the motherboard out of the chassis looks like an impossible procedure. When I replaced the power plug, I just soldered to the traces on the top of the board -- there was no getting it detached and then put back together again.

Another reason why laptops, for all their convenience, are nearly impossible to fix, maintain and upgrade. But they are convenient. Still, the more I use laptops, the more I like what desktops have to offer in terms of price, power, reliability and ability to be repaired and rebuilt.

But since this laptop fell into my lap (hence it's $0 name), and it's the best computer I have at my Linux-using disposal, I'm committed to making it work. In many ways, it's nice to know that a 1.3 GHz Celeron laptop with 256 MB of RAM can run the mainline Linux distros quite well.

I've already got Wolvix set up with a separate /home partition, and I don't know if I want to share it with Ubuntu. It might be OK if I keep Ubuntu a GNOME installation and Wolvix with Xfce. It's worth a try, anyway, but I might opt for either an additional /home partition for Ubuntu or /home in the main partition, backing it up regularly to the separate Wolvix /home partition.

I've said it before (and thought it more), one's allegiance to Linux or BSD distributions has a whole lot to do with how those distros run on the hardware one has. OK, instead of "one," I should say "me."

I've spent a lot of time running Debian over the last year, but when it comes to the $0 Laptop, I've scanned dozens of xorg.conf files looking for the secrets of the Alps touchpad, but I've determined that it's very hard to control it. And Ubuntu (as well as CentOS, Puppy and now Wolvix) runs better on this Gateway laptop than many, many other distributions, some of which run with problems, others not at all.

On my desktop system, I can't run CentOS 5 at all (I think I had 3.9 installed for awhile), but Slackware and Debian run great, as does Ubuntu (and Puppy and Damn Small Linux). I could use a new desktop system (my Maxspeed Maxterm converted thin client runs considerably worse than the Gateway laptop), but for not it's all about the laptop, and I've just got to come to terms with the fact that Debian just isn't running as well as it should. Still, I never had a Debian install on the Gateway go "bad" like the Ubuntus ...

I prefer a "consumer/enthusiast" distro like Debian or Slackware to an "enterprise" distro like Red Hat/CentOS, mostly because the enterprise market is very focused on servers and not on the desktop. And I also don't have a very firm grasp on rpm and yum, the package management tools in Red Hat. Trying to add a repository was beyond my skills, but it might be time for me to give it another go. I need a book -- that's for sure.

But ... if I could find a wireless adapter that worked either through USB or PCMCIA and a distribution that would allow it to work with WPA encryption, that would be a strong motivator to install that distro and hang on for dear life.

Final words: Wolvix is looking awfully good. I did the full install, and any performance lags I found with Wolvix on the Maxspeed Maxterm have evaporated on the Gateway laptop, where it's a very snappy environment. I plan to keep a close eye on Wolvix and learn more about who puts it together and who uses it.