So my daughter Deb (nearly 18, yes, I know how to get people read my blog, no, there's no link to her pic) is fed up with Windows 98 on her laptop (my previous laptop!) and she asked for having Linux on it. And this is very difficult for me as she expects things to work smoothly when she'll come home in a few hours. First of all, the laptop has only 128 Mb RAM and all is very slow. I totally forgot about that... I installed Mandrake 10.0 because I have CDs for that distro and then upgraded to Mandrake 10.1 Sadly it does not have KDE 3.3 so I'll stick with 3.2 as I don't have time to fiddle with a compilation right now. My objective is to configure all the programs she usually needs. Firefox is prefered over Konqueror at the moment as she knows it and it blocks popups (efficiently. And no, this is not the start of a new war!) It was a bit long to install the required plugins (flash and acrobat). Then Kopete, I hope it'll be OK, I have to wait for her to configure and test it. Messaging is her most used application! OpenOffice was installed from Mandrake and it was easy to set it to chek spelling for French docs. Juk will manage her huge mp3 collection.
Now I have to restaure the backup files I made on another machine. Of course the local network is never reachable. I usually achieve to see other machines after some tricks but not today... This would be to be improved in KDE, for newbies it's just too complicated: the Lisa daemon, the smb server (or client?), the protocols. So I burnt the files on a CD-RW (2.5 Gb of music files), first CD was OK but second one appeared with ???? as filenames and folders names. I had to umount it and mount it again.
Shall I say that I quite like this Mandrake windows decoration style?
I am concerned about everything being so slow, I am not sure she'll be able to play DVDs. Maybe I'll have to suppress some processes and services but I don't know which ones...
Anyway, she'll have from this evening until Saturday to see if she wants to keep it. True fact is that out of 4 PCs || laptops, 3 Windows are out of service after not even 1 year. One cannot boot anymore (Leah aged 6 was the last one to play on it), the second has lost internet connection (the ethernet card is recognized but not configured or something, ipconfig does nothing. My son denies of course having anything to do with that) and the 3rd was Debs windows 98 which was all bloated...
2 comments:
You might wish to give Yoper a shot. I found that it's pretty zippy. Much faster than SUSE, then again, IMO nothing touches SUSE's ease of use or just works.
I've had Yoper on a Compac Deskpro EN PII 266, with 128 megs of RAM. It's rather barebones, but the performance was quite good, all things considered. Not to mention, you can also use Rieser4.
Thanks a lot, yes, I'll give Debian a shot when my daughter is on holiday! Open Office is unfortunately needed because of school work compatibility. Otherwise it is true that such an end-user does not need plenty of applications, only a few are really useful. It's been several times that I heard of Yoper, this sounds like a nice distribution as well!
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