joe ferrare's blog

Just got done setting up Linux on the machine of a friend. Her husband got the laptop free (!) for signing up for some service, probably DSL. Anyway, it’s not a killer laptop. It’s got a 1.2 Ghz Via C3 processor, which means it probably runs about as fast as a 600 Mhz Pentium. But it’s got a nice enough 14″ screen and is otherwise OK for laptop kind of computer work he wants to do — surfing, e-mail, writing (we need a new snappy one-liner on the order of readin’ writin’ and ‘ritmatic to capture the surfing, e-mailing and word processing trio a lot of people use their computers for). Hey: my laptop runs at 600 Mhz most of the time, thanks to frequency scaling to save battery life.
It came with Knoppix (and a “designed for Windows XP” label) on it . They seemed to have done a terrible job installing the system. Knoppix is a live CD, which means you don’t have to install it to your hard drive to use it. You can run Linux from the CD. But it’s huge and has all kinds of things the average user doesn’t need. The husband is retired, and it’s his first computer, so I don’t think he needs any high speed stuff. Parts of it also seemed to think it was still running off a CD (disk is not writeable errors), and they set aside 3.5 GB for the swap partition (the usual is about twice your physical RAM, which would be about 512 MB in this case).
Well, after trying to bring the thing up to date (it came with version 3.8 and 5.0 is the current version), I just downloaded Kanotix Lite and installed that. Worked like a charm. Spent a few minutes setting up his KDE preferences, simplifying his panel and so on, and the machine is a good 15 or 20 percent faster (don’t ask me how I know; it’s just snappier to use).

That makes four people I’ve set up with Linux now. That’s out of a pretty small group of people, as the Garmisch American community is pretty small. Now that I think about it, though, neither of them is American. She’s British and he’s Austrian. Anyway, small world to be evangelizing Linux.

I’m going to revisit the other machine I recently installed Linux on. I put Zenwalk on it, and have since discovered STX Linux, and it is perfect for that machine. It’s a 300 Mhz laptop with 128 MB of RAM — and an off-brand machine at that. Zenwalk runs a lot better than Windows 2000 on it (yeah, Windows 2000), but still, STX looks to be perfect. Or maybe I’ll give Kanotix Lite a try. It has IceWM in addition to KDE, and IceWM is about the right speed.
I just realized I have yet to install the same version of Linux twice. The four I’ve installed were Mepis, PCLinuxOS, Zenwalk and now Kanotix Lite. Funny, that, espeically because I’m a die-hard Slackware user. I’ve got one other person asking to try Linux out, and I’m going to install a music-specific version for him, because he’s into mixing his own tunes. It’s a wonderful world, this Linux.