Linux Snob

I am posting this from a fresh Simply Mepis Linux Install. I have been reading a lot lately about various Linux distros and why people chose them. I have done a bit of research and found several that should run on the hardware I have for testing (an HP 4150 Omnibook (PIII, 650 mhz, 256 megs of RAM, DVD player, wireless B ethernet, wired 10/100 Ethernet). I had to do a little work on it before it was even usable, but that is another story.

I looked at several distros and installed quite a few over the past couple of days (it rained again on Friday and Saturday...Sunday was sunny). I did not install some of the more popular ones because I thought the minimum requirements would exceed what the laptop has, but it appears that Fedora Core and OpenSuse both could run (although a bit slow) on this laptop. OpenSuse is the most memory intensive...256 meg is the minimum. I still may give FC6 a try later if I get tired of what I am using now.

I started this project with Ubuntu 6.10 but it was an odd (albeit very easy) install. First had issues with a wireless card (even with WiFi Radar installed) that Edgy natively supports and later the network manager applets were acting very weird...saying that there was no network when I was running wirelessly. Also the ATI Rage Mobility card was causing issues with the install and it was frustrating to have poor graphics part of the time...enough for me to start over with another distro.

I played with Dream Linux next...both live and install. The live one went very well but the install was only a partial success. The setup was all graphical (similar to Ubuntu) but not quite as friendly to noobs. Since I was familiar with Linux partitions I did not have much trouble, but neophytes certainly would. The DL install had some minor file manager issues, but they were not show stoppers. It played media (ALL kinds) very well...I was quite impressed. The packages were a bit outdated so I did an apt-get update && apt-get upgrade and things went crazy. The repos were not all valid and finding valid ones was difficult since most of the support was in the native language of the distro...Portuguese. Since upgrade availability is a show stopper (package mgmt is very important to me), that was removed. I did not even try wireless. On to the next distro, Zenwalk.

Zenwalk was an ncurses based install and went pretty smoothly. I was happy with the speed and the overall look and feel (it uses XFCE as a desktop system...which I prefer) but it was not handling my touch pad and "eraser head" mouse of the laptop very well. When I plugged in and external PS/2 mouse, it was fine. Since I really do not want to rely on an external mouse, Zenwalk had its first strike. The second strike came when I tried to get the wireless card to work. The card was recognized but I could not get it to talk to my router. I gave up on it after looking online for support (which was not as good as Ubuntu by any means) and finding nothing. Strike three...on to the next distro.

I had tried Vector Linux once a while back and the only problem I had was my lack of familiarity with the package manager. Once that learning curve was over, I found a lot of little bugs in 5.0 that were annoying so I removed it and went back to Ubuntu. Now that I had a new piece of hardware to play with I thought that I would give VL 5.8 a try. I like the XFCE dekstop but it had the same issues that Zenwalk had with wireless and the support base is still very small. Strikes 1 and 2 had been thrown and I did not give it any more of my time. I went on to the next distro...

I had forgotten about Simply Mepis until I saw it on distrowatch.org the other day (BtW, that is a great resource if you are looking for info on new and updated Linux distributions). The latest stable release is 6.0 but a bug fix upgrade coming soon. I have read a lot of good things about SM from many newer Linux users and when I found out that the creator (a resident of my home state of WV) was using some Ubuntu repositories, I was excited. I read that the creator wanted the best of both distros and that is how SM was created. With a spark of excitement, I downloaded and installed it.

The install was not quite as easy as Ubuntu, but it was not hard. The desktop is KDE (not a favorite, but I wanted to at least give it a shot) and it took a while to find things...long enough that I had to go online to figure out where to set up the networking (it was not obvious to me). I found that I had to do was run "mutilities" from the command line and a config window opened and allowed me to configure networking. I got my wireless card set up very quickly...so quickly that I did not even set up wired Ethernet...I am writing this entry from the wireless connection! Okay, this is looking up...even if it is KDE.

I then looked at updating. Since this is Debian based, apt-get update && apt-get upgrade would get me my updates. 214 updates were waiting so I took them all. 30 or so minutes later...SM was updated. I launched Firefox and checked the version...uh oh .. version 1.5.9, not 2.0 like I had expected. I figured that when I have issues with my Ubuntu box, I go to the forums for help...I will give that a try here. It did not take much time at all to find articles on why I was having this issue. The fix was simple...editing the sources.list file just like I do with Ubuntu when I need specific updates. A copy and past over the old file gave me an updated list (actually only a few lines had been added. If I was smart, I would have saved a copy of the old file...just in case) that an update and upgrade used to upgrade a lot...including FF to 2.0. El Gee was happy! So far the only strike is KDE...It played DVD's without any problems (although they did stutter at bit...I read this is being fixed in the bug fix release) and mp3 playback was great "out of the box". It also detected, mounted, and opened my USB thumb drive flawlessly. This distro is looking pretty good. I will have to really put it through its paces to see what it can do on this humble 650 mhz machine.

More to come.