I am a card-carrying Mac user, ever since OSX came along, but before that (and after an abusive relationship with Windows), I started getting into Linux and learning all the gnarly bits to actually get some real use out of my aging PCs. Nowadays I really like Ubuntu. As much as I am a technophile, I have gone beyond the point where fiddling with software to get it running is anything less than annoying; if it doesn’t “just work”, then I’m out. Ubuntu has that “it just works” feel to it, and I’ve had such a good experience with it that it has become my Linux distro of choice. But sadly, Ubuntu and I have come to an impasse (at least in this case).
I applaud the work of Linux developers — I get “Hulk smash” angry just making a website behave in Internet Explorer, and I can’t imagine what it must be like trying to make an operating system that will run on the myriad configurations of hardware out there in PC-land. This particular configuration, an old Sony Vaio PCG-FX390K laptop, is one such hobgoblin.
I’ve had this thing sitting around unused for far too long, but lately have decided to try and get some use out of it. Reluctantly I put a fresh install of Win2k (the OS it came with) to run Fruityloops, but I soon realized that the management of yet another install of Windows (my Macs run Boot Camp with XP) was something I just didn’t want to do. That, and FL was glitchy and somewhat less than usable on it. At this point I probably should have just thrown it down the stairs, called the incident “an unfortunate accident”, and moved on. But being the obsessive person I am, I couldn’t let it go. I have trouble letting things go, you know.
Anyway, here’s where it starts to get interesting. No, really. Maybe. Since I decided I didn’t want a mostly useless Win2k lappy sitting around, I realized what I really could use was a machine for recording audio that could serve as a web-surfing machine for those days when I don’t extricate my MacBook from its life-support system of peripherals and external hard drives on my office desk. “Good idea” I say to myself, “I’ll just install Ubuntu on it and see how it goes”.
Linux Live CDs are awesome. Seriously. I popped in the Ubuntu 8.10 CD and watched the old lappy being reborn… except for one annoying little problem. The sad little Intel 815em integrated graphics chip was unrecognized, suffering at a miserable default resolution of 800×600, which on this particular laptop leaves a thick black border around the screen and many OS windows dangling off the edge. Great. But everything else works. After some Googling I find I am not the only one with this screen rez problem, and sadly I am not the only one who has yet to find a solution. I tried a bunch of xorg.conf tricks, installed other flavors of Ubuntu, and got nowhere.
Time to try some other distros. UbuntuStudio and Linux Mint, both suffered the same problem (not surprisingly). Moving on to unknown (to me) distros, I decided to give Mandriva a shot, even though the system requirements were beyond my sorry old Vaio.
Bingo. Everything seems to be working great, except… Mandriva just has this “Windows” smell to it. From the installation “wizard” to the over-designed default theme, it feels a bit like WindowsXP, and maybe that is what the Mandriva team is going for. It certainly appears that they are trying to be a Windows-alternative rather than a user-friendly Linux distro. Hopefully with some theme tweaking it’ll feel less icky.
Do you have any favorite distros? Which? Why?
