Last night, I finally reached a breaking point.

I have an aging 1.6ghz Sempron laptop that I was using to run Windows XP. I use the term “run” somewhat loosely. It was more like a hobbling walk. On a clean reboot, it took fully seven minutes and thirty seconds to reach a state where I could actually run a program. After a crash, it was more than twelve minutes.

“Surely”, you say, “you must have some spyware or viruses slowing the machine down!”

You’d think so, wouldn’t you. But the most recent scans with Norton’s and Windows Defender indicated nothing. From my point of view, Norton’s was the virus: it was one of the principle programs that seemed to lead to long boot times.

Yesterday, I reached a breaking point: at 10:00pm, I decided to nuke my last vestige of Microsoft dependency, and put linux on my laptop.

Gasp! He’s a madman!

The funny thing is that by eleven, I was running ubuntu (it took me twenty minutes or so to download the latest Dapper Drake release), and I was half watching a movie, otherwise it would
have been twenty minutes or so. Within another half hour, I had all the updates loaded, rebooted once and had the latest kernel.

Two things have stymied me in putting linux on laptops before: power control and wireless cards. Power control literally worked right out of the box: my laptop (which under windows XP ran the fan continuously now is loafing with its clockspeed throttled safely back to 530Mhz from its peak value of 1.6ghz. The fan is barely running. All is as it should be. My laptop is actually quiet once again.

The wireless card thing was a bit more tricky, and required an hour of spelunking. I decided to use the ndiswrapper stuff, needed to find the appropriate windows driver, and disable the wrong probe in /etc/modules.d/blacklist so it would use ndiswrapper, but by 12:30AM, I had that working too. In fact, I’m using this laptop to actually post as we speak.

Ubuntu isn’t flawless, but I really like it.  I won’t be coming back.

[tags]Linux,Linux Advocacy,Ubuntu,Microsoft,Rant and Rave[/tags]