After being impressed with Mandrake Linux 9.1 as I wrote in the previous post, I decided to install it on my old Compaq laptop (an Armada 1592DT). This is a Pentium 233Mhz machine with 64MB of ram and a 3GB hard disk. I had a feeling this was going to be a mistake and I was right … the latest ‘desktop-based’ distros are quite resource intensive, even if you’re not running much, just X. Of course I didn’t run KDE or GNOME, but even booting the machine and logging in was painful! The whole installation ordeal made my laptop so hot I had to prop it up on some cd cases to cool it down.

Oh well, I used to have a perfect Slackware installation on it running Fluxbox as the window manager and Opera as the browser. Distributions such as Slackware and Debian are really very useful in situations like this, because you can install just the minimum amount necessary and get on with it. So I scrapped Mandrake and installed Debian 3.0r0. No problems so far, I’m using the same fluxbox/opera combination. A very light window manager, and quite a light browser. Opera only takes up about 14% of memory on start up and is taking up about 35% right now, which is fine as browsing is the primary purpose of this machine anyway. Oh well, lesson learned. Shiny new desktop distros just don’t belong on older and slower laptops, even with many services turned off. You’re better off going with a light-weight distro like Slackware or a minimal Debian install.

Woohoo! My wife has passed her PLAB 2 examinations! She got the results yesterday, and I (and so many other people) are immensely proud of her. She was terrified of getting the results, not knowing what to expect. But she has excelled beyond all expectations. Many congrats to her!

After finally getting over the exam stress we went out to celebrate, she also got to do some pseudo-shopping, aka window-shopping, aka ‘we didn’t buy anything’. It was still a good day out despite the unappealing weather today.

The 5-day weather forecast that I used to get from InterceptVector has been down for so many days now. I hope the problem is fixed soon as I spent a while writing my parser for it In any case at least I anticipated problems and so the site nicely changes over to another weather feed whenever there is a problem. Cool.

I’m going to change the stupid ‘kerneljack.com’ image heading soon to something more tasteful. As a side note I’ve installed the new Mandrake Linux 9.1 on one machine at home and it is quite impressive how far linux has come, but, as always it still has a little bit more to go. Mandrake is quite usable for normal users, though a little bit of learning may be needed. Unlike previous distros, it detected my printer, and digital camera flawlessly. Impressive. I’m also hearing great things about Suse 8.2 and will try it sometime. I still really like Debian, Gentoo, LFS, and all the other roll-your-own distros though. I’m still going to use debian for any server-based distro and probably for some desktops. That’s whats great about linux: choice.