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.

I’ve also switched on boot concurrency and installed preload, as discussed in this forum thread. Early days, but it does feel very snappy indeed. The bootup doesn’t seem much faster, although apparently preload can slow things up a tad, but it is still around one minute, including about 5 seconds for the bios and another 15 seconds for typing in the kdm and kwalletmanager passwords.

I’ve also moved the unmountnfs.sh from the shutdown scripts to position 14, to enable this to be completed before closing the network services. This has dramatically improved the shutdown performance.

Follow these links for more information:

• Debian EeePC Tips & Tricks
• Debian Forum Topic

Lastly, exim4 is installed by default, but you really don’t need this if, like me, you send/receive mail through a dedicated server, this shaves a second or two from the boot process.

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!

For me, it’s just about perfect.

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.

So I researched a replacement laptop, and ordered a Toshiba Satellite Pro A300, with 3gb RAM and 250gb hard drive. I ordered with downgrade media to XP Pro. Yes, anyone who has read my previous postings will appreciate just how appallingly hypocritical that is; but given that I will need XP to run under VirtualBox, and given that you don’t seem to save any money by not having it, it made sense (even if it irks to be constantly adding to MS profits).

Tempted though I was to install Kubuntu 8.10 (my old laptop ran 8.04), I decided that the sensible thing to do (given KDE version) was to install Debian Lenny. Obviously I had chosen a laptop which should be readily Linux compatible, so I did expect an easy time, and so it proved. I decided to install the 64-bit version.

The installer picked up our DHCP server without a fuss, and prompted me to insert the non-free driver for the Intel wireless into a USB stick, which I did and it picked up without a fuss. I asked the guided partitioner to give me a separate home, but apart from those two interactions, I just accepted the default for everything else.

I booted into Debian, and noticed that they have prettied kdm in the past few weeks, and even given kwin a new default wallpaper. OpenOffice 2.4 and Iceweasel were already installed, so there really wasn’t much else to do.

The good news is that, thus far at least, all the packages that I have wanted have been available (remember this is 64-bit). As far as I know (I’m new to 64-bit) I have a pure 64-bit system. It all seems very snappy, apart from OpenOffice, which takes a second or two to load.

The astonishing thing, and something that I have never seen mentioned in any Linux vs Windows review, is how quick it is to go from zero to actually having a fully productive machine. Probably close to one hour.

There is one negative, which is that for some reason Debian Lenny 32-bit and 64-bit have a mismatch in versions between virtualbox-ose and virtualbox-ose-modules. Such problems are only to be expected (Lenny hasn’t been officially released yet) and I have checked that there is a bug report logged. To fix the problem in the meantime:

$ sudo aptitude remove virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.26-1-amd64
$ sudo rmmod vboxdrv
$ sudo aptitude install build-essential module-assistant
$ sudo aptitude install virtualbox-ose-source
$ sudo module-assistant auto-install virtualbox-ose
$ sudo dpkg -l virtualbox*  (check all are at same version)
$ sudo modprobe vboxdrv