The Linux Extremist

Note: It’s been a while since I published a blog entry - however, I’ve updated the software and now it’s fully up and running again.

I’ll re-open this blog with my experiences with a new laptop.

My HP laptop was - at long last - about to die. All hardware manufacturers put in a lifespan on their equipment, mine was no exception. I replaced the battery and the hard drive, but the computer was taking longer to boot, hard drive failures were starting to crop up, and even the power on button was starting to not respond as it used to: it took enough pressure to crush a golf ball just to switch on the thing.

So for my sins, I got a new Lenovo 3000 N200 laptop - with Windows Vista Ultimate.

I experimented with Vista for a couple of weeks; while it was pretty, it annoyed me nearly instantly. This is a new laptop with a dual core processor and 2 GB of RAM. Why was it taking a solid 10 minutes to boot? Granted, some of the blame lies with Lenovo insisting on stuffing the laptop full of their own bloatware, but even with that removed, its boot time was considerably slower than the laptop that I just left behind.

The experiment was further compounded by purchasing Office 2007. This too was slow to boot on a machine of this power; much has been made about its revamped navigation, but the icon and menus motif leaves much to be desired. Furthermore, it nearly choked on the novel I’m writing.

I waited for Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon to be released; its arrival was a godsend. As soon as it came out, I turned the Lenovo into a dual boot machine.

The performance differential is huge. What once was a slow clunker turned into a graceful, fast and elegant machine. I asked someone to time me while I booted the same machine up using Ubuntu as opposed to Vista - Ubuntu was eight minutes faster.

This is not to say that Ubuntu didn’t need tweaking; unfortunately there were two problems to be addressed at the outset - the audio didn’t work, and there was an annoying screen flicker associated with the Nvidia driver.

The screen flicker issue has a simple resolution:

1. Goto: System>Preferences>Advanced desktop settings (The compiz config settings manager)
2. Click on General options>display settings
3. Untick Detect Output
4. Manually input your screen’s resolution (1680×1050+0+0 for this model)

Fixing the sound was more complicated, however, I found some useful instructions here.

Thanks to using the Moomex themes for both Compiz and Gnome, I haven’t lost any eye candy either; its appearance is just as high tech and elegant as that of Vista. The other new installation I’ve made was to put on the Swiftweasel Browser. This has proven to be incredibly fast - far outstripping Firefox on Vista.

So why don’t I get rid of Vista entirely? Were it not for Rome: Total War, I probably would. But having to dip into the Windows world every so often is a cogent reminder of why one is a Linux person: greater speed, efficiency, performance, and apart from the gaming aspect, a lot more fun.

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