Ever had a crack in your laptop screen? The answer seems to be Debian

I've had this crack in the screen on one of my two identical 8-year-old Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptops — the one on which I run Ubuntu 9.10.

Originally it only affected the lower right side of the screen, and the laptop was still somewhat usable. I moved my desktop-switcher and trash basket over to the left so I could see them, and at the office I started using an external CRT monitor and keyboard (the trackpads on both Toshibas have been dead longer than I can remember, so I always use an external USB mouse).

Well, tonight I'm finishing up my production shift at home and I discover that the crack has migrated all the way across the LCD screen, making it unusable.

I've been planning awhile to possibly swap LCDs between the two Toshibas. After all, while the Ubuntu Toshiba has a bad screen and bad CMOS battery, it has a better space bar (one that works all the time) a non-flaky inverter for the screen and working sound. The Debian Lenny Toshiba — on which I now type — has, if you're following, dead sound, dead touchpad, flaky inverter ("fix" is pressing on the lid-closing switch when the screen blanks out; an easy fix if there ever was one), flaky space bar ... but working screen, Debian Lenny (the Stable release of the distro upon which Ubuntu and dozens of others are built) and a setup with fully encrypted LVM, which doesn't seem to slow things down too much when compared to Ubuntu on an almost identical machine.

Oh, the Ubuntu Toshiba has 1 GB of RAM. The Debian Toshiba has 512 MB. Again they pretty much run the same — and I bet that wouldn't be the case if the RAM situation were reversed, which it soon will be if I move my user files over to the Debian machine.

I've had this Debian laptop ready as a backup for quite awhile now. It has Java and Flash installed. I have the RT73 firmware needed (but not in the default install) for the CNet CWD-854 USB WiFi adapter. No sound, true. But that's really not a deal-breaker.

If pulling the hard drive from the Toshiba were only as easy as it is from the kid's Gateway Solo 1450 ... No, Toshiba decided to NOT allow the user to easily remove the hard drive. Basically the whole piece of crap needs to be disassembled to get at the hard disk drive.

I continue to be astounded at all the laptop manufacturers who assume you'll never want to either change the hard drive, especially after the thing is out of warranty, or never want to easily remove it when "retiring" the laptop for security's sake.

Idiots. The same idiocy came into play in the design of our Apple iBook G4, which needed a new hard drive, resulting in an operation that took me more than two sweaty hours to tear down and put back together in order to do the repair. Steve Jobs, I don't forgive you.

Anyhow, I've been keeping pretty good backups (two, in fact) of the Ubuntu laptop's user files, and I'm more than able to update those backups and then rsync the files into the Debian laptop. I just might do that tomorrow.

And I probably mentioned as recently as yesterday that I was fairly gung-ho during Lenny's Testing phase ... until Xorg decided to start messing with the Intel drivers and I couldn't figure out how to make the display on the aforementioned Gateway laptop behave without artifacts messing up the screen.

I eventually went with OpenBSD, which had no trouble and performed spectacularly until the in-place upgrade (which I'm told no one ever does, opting instead for reinstalls every time) from 4.4 to 4.5 that, again due to Xorg issues, made X inoperable.

At that point Ubuntu Hardy installed easily and ran X perfectly, so I went with it, eventually upgrading to 8.10 and 9.04 in a couple of days in preparation for 9.10, which while at a "good place" currently (excepting the dying LCD) has taken considerable tinkering to get there.

I'm sure that the versions of Xorg newer than what's in Lenny today might cause similar problems with the Toshiba's Intel 830m video chip. But my recent test of OpenBSD 4.6 via jggimi's live DVD (the GNOME version) shows that its version of X is pretty much perfect on this chip. ... If only I could get a couple of Web-based apps, one using Java, the other the dreaded Flash, to behave in my favorite BSD, I'd be using it right now.

But as it stands, Debian is getting the job done, and circumstances (those being my reluctance to pull not one but two LCDs and swap them without killing the "good" one in the process) dictate that I spend some time in the world according to Lenny.