Okay, to be quite honest my Debian Lenny 64-bit Toshiba Satellite Pro A300 laptop is really fast. Certainly the fastest machine that I’ve ever used, problem is that makes you hungry for more speed. So far I have followed several of the suggestions included in this Debian EeePC page, for example adding the relatime option to the disks.
Temptation got the better of me (as usual) and I installed kde-compiz. Unsurprisingly the very basic graphic card, on this business-focused laptop, gave a pretty poor compiz performance. If you’re after 3D acceleration for gaming and desktop effects, then you’re probably looking for a different laptop!
I guess the logical replacement distro to install on an eepc, is the Ubuntu EeePC remix. To be quite honest I think you have to have a pretty compelling reason to go anywhere else. My compelling reasons were that I just wanted a standard distro, that I know well and can look after without having to learn new skills; as a KDE user I ideally wanted access to KDE apps. It really was always going to be Debian Lenny EeePC.
When my old Dell laptop died, I naturally fell back to using my EeePC. Now I’ve been using my EeePC for about six months now, and a very happy user I have been. When I first bought it, I visited eeeuser.com to enable me to add icons to the easy mode interface, so that I could add openvpn and NoMachine NX for connecting to our LTSP server. Once done I had an ideal machine for taking notes and doing occasional server admin from the shell, and even connect to our LTSP server via VPN.
The battery on my ageing Dell Inspiron 8200 had to be replaced recently, then the charger, and then (perhaps damage from cheap charger/battery?) the laptop died completely with amperage warnings about a month later.
Yes, you’re right, my RSS feed is rubbish. The RSS feed is generated by my own script, which was rather hastily cobbled together. I am currently playing with Drupal and am loving it. Rather than sort out my RSS feed, what I would like to do is migrate over to Drupal at some point in the future, and let that handle the feeds.
Watch this space!
GTK applications in KDE always look horrible. In Kubuntu this is taken care of for you, but in Debian it is only a quick install away:
$ sudo aptitude install gtk-qt-engine
Following on from my recent installation of 64-bit Debian Lenny on my new Toshiba laptop, I was horrified to learn that neither Flash nor Java exist for 64-bit Linux. But after some digging it transpired that all was not lost. Whilst Java is not available, the IcedTea project has reinvented the Sun Java Plugin.
One of the few things that we miss from the old Microsoft days is the “briefcase”. In particular our MD used it every day and loved it. On Linux the best open source alternative is probably Unison File Synchroniser.
I got this working a few weeks ago and it was incredibly simple to get working and a joy to use. I personally didn’t really have a need for this software, but now that it’s installed it just so convenient that I am finding myself using it regularly.
Some weeks ago the hard drive on my work PC failed, with a temperature error on the hard drive. I swapped the drive out but then had to decide which distro to install. I had started my Linux life with Kubuntu, experimented with Debian Sid + Experimental, before returning to Kubuntu. Given Debian Lenny’s imminent release, the logical progression was to try that.