Linux on a laptop

[bryan1]

Hiya Guy's,
Well after reading on the net that my asus A2400 wasn't compatible with linux I disregarding all their crap and went ahead and installed Ubuntu 6.06. At first getting a modem to work was fun so I borrowed a 56K external modem from work and got it going 1st attempt

The next challenge was getting the isdn working and by writing a modem script in the wvdial.conf file it worked first time . Now downloading at 15Kb/s is better than 5Kb/s anyday and it only took about 22 hours to download the knoppix iso, only to find out its KDE based, full of bell's and whistle's and everything you dont need. So the next big download is going to be the latest debian release and work from the ground up. Now give it a month or two to convince my wife that winblows is gone in our household for ever is the hard part but I told her I'm going to find an old p3 and turn it into a server so our son can have a computer in his bedroom and her veiw changed. .

well enough of my ranting I'm just wrapped I can see winblows dieing quickly in our house and never have to worry about virus's, the dreaded micro$oft update etc.

Cheers Bryan

 

[Styx]

nice,

if you are going for Debian, may I suggest Ubuntu (for GNOME interface) or Kubuntu (for KDE interface) or Xbuntu (for XFCE interface... lightweight).

The use of knoppix is as a liveCD desktop replacement as well as a showcase and thus liveCD's tend to be packed with a wide range of programs.

The problem with Debian is they are not the most uptodate distro (but that is very good for servers since deb-based ones are very secure and stable). Ubuntu takes all the good bits of debian and tries to bring a bit more upto dateness about it

WinModems are a real pain I am actually really impressed you got it working


just remember linux is different not harder then windows (my background was Amiga then Unix and when I first got my hands on a windows machine... Win98 it was WTF is this crap and whats with this crashing thing).
My wife actually really prefers my Gentoo:GNOME desktop over the XP on her machine.

there is soo much that people just accept, like PC's are suppose to crash, they are suppose to slow down, they are suppose to be re-installed. Linux is a very big eye-opener and once you get use to the differences some major bugbears will be seen in how windows works


One thing I just hate with windows is the middle-mouse button

in linux I can highlight some text and then goto where I want to paste and just press the middle-mouse! such a time save, cant do that in windows

 

[Hero999]

I like Linux but it does have its downsides on the destop department. Coying and pasting between applications only works with text, for example if you try to pase an image from Inkscape to ABIWord it won't work. Drag 'n' drop just isn't the same, you can't drag icons from all applications to and from the desktop.

 

[hjames]

I was actually pretty surprised when I drag-drop'd an image from a gnome desktop into an openoffice doc, so it's definitely moving - although the downside is that my Linux desktop is now starting to get cluttered up with junk...

The biggest drawback of Linux on laptops is that the power management is going to be mostly missing. If you ever need to have a standby mode on a Linux machine, be prepared for a lot of grief.

 

[Hero999]

Draging and dropping emails from Thunderbird to KDE doesn't work (or it didn't the last time I tried it). The reason for this is that (unlike Windows) Linux (and UNIX in general) wasn't designed as a desktop operating system from the ground up. Desktops were an add-on and therefore there were loads of different standards. Things are progressing though and this is likely to change in the neer future.