Back to Linux - a podcast by ApocD

I first tried Linux 2 years ago, and after a struggle of several months to get it working on an old laptop, I gave up. The laptop was just too old, and Linux was just too complicated. I spent more of my time on the command line than using the computer for anything productive, so I retreated to my iMac.

Two weeks ago, I picked up a used laptop in Den-Den Town, Osaka's younger brother to Tokyo's Akihabara. The laptop's an HP/Compaq 9040 with a 1.4 GHz Celeron, 512MB of RAM, and a 40Gb harddrive. It came with Japanese Windows XP, which I'm leaving on the system just to have a Windows computer. I partitioned the drive and left half of it to XP, and I'm using the other half for Linux. It's taken me a couple of weeks, but I think I've settled on a distribution. Here's how it happened.

I started with a lot of Live CDs. I tried out most of the top ten distributions on distrowatch and a few others. My first install was the latest Ubuntu, 8.04. I started with Ubuntu because it seems to be the distribution of choice for Linux novices like me. I've had enough of the brown theme, but it was easy enough to change my desktop around. I noticed after I installed Ubuntu that the Internet connection was slow. I went to speedtest.net and found my downstream was around 300 Kbs. The same laptop, when running Windows through the same wireless connection, was getting 7 Mbs, so I knew something was wrong in Ubuntu. My wireless card is a Corega with a Ralink 2500 chipset. After some googling, I found that Ubuntu and this chipset don't play well together. So, I installed the Windows driver and it worked fine, until I restarted. I know I needed to disable the old driver, but after following the instructions to do so the connection was still screwed up. So, I dropped Ubuntu.

Up next was OpenSuse 10.3. It ran my wireless card with no needed configuration and also hibernated the laptop, something Ubuntu didn't do. I decided to try out a CD and this is when things went wrong. It got hung up on the CDDB lookup, and I couldn't even eject the CD. After I finally got it to play a CD, after a couple of reboots, it still couldn't rip one, so I dropped OpenSuse.

And now we come to Mandriva. It runs the wireless card with no problems, hibernates, and plays CDs. So far, I'm really impressed. I'm writing this post now in Mandriva.

Although I've encountered problems trying to set up Linux on this laptop, I have to say I'm really impressed with the progress Linux has made in the last two years. Through all of these installations and Live CDs, I've yet to do anything on the command line. It's tough making an operating system to work on so many hardware variations, so I feel lucky to have found a distribution that likes my hardware. Now, to get my hands on a book to teach me more about Linux. Any recommendations?

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