Light Bloggery (Updated) 0

Upgrading the OS on the laptop.

Addendum:

I wasn’t able to get my Favorite LInux Distro on the box. Slackware is a three-CD set and, after the first CD ran, the CD drive opened and would not remount for the next CD.

This is definitely a hardware problem. The Slackware CDs have been tested in another machine.

The CD drive in this box has been acting weird for over a year. Sometimes it mounts and sometimes Dell throws a message that it “cannot detect the device in the modular bay blah blah blah.” Pressing the CD drive more tightly into the machine and rebooting solves the problem.

I’m not springing for a new CD drive for an almost-five-year-old laptop.

So I went with the Debian web install, which is a one-CD install, but pulls down three CD’s worth of software.

I’m now running Debian 5 with Gnome. Debian, like Slack, is a rock-solid distro that just works. It does not have Slackware’s elegant simplicity, but, what the heck.

It was tough fight, but I wrestled the computer into submission. (I always do.)

The firewall is working, the AV is working, the network is working, the theme is configured to my liking, and Opera (which includes my email database) and Pan have been restored from backup. Total time from install boot to full functionality: Two hours.