Laptop (un)love

The epic story of failing computer hardware which has come into my hands is surely as depressing as ever. I’ve sent my motherboard back to the vendor, to be checked and replaced if necessary. Warranty expires in another 2 weeks, phew. If the motherboard comes back clean, I’ll have to send in the RAM.

I knew I would be without my pc for a little while, so I decided to update the laptop’s kernel, and stay fresh with all things kde related. My distro of choice is arch - a trustworthy, handrolled, bleeding edge release, which is easy to maintain, especially to update and super fast. Unfortunately, leaving such a distro stagnant without updating causes havoc when bringing it up to speed. My biggest problem, by far, was troubleshooting the madwifi drivers for my atheros based wifi card. With kernel updates, and my own custom built modules, nothing worked.

I spent three days trying to fix it, playing with modprobe and all those fun games. So much frustration caused me to boot into the kubuntu livecd and simply overwrite the partitions with it. I’ve been quite impressed with kubuntu, especially the way which it sparkles and glitters. I loved the fade in splash . It recognised my wifi card immediately, but having to use sudo for every command is irritating me. Oh well. Apt worked well too, but it still isn’t anywhere near as awesome as pacman is for arch. It was a breeze to install suse’s knetworkmanager, which is just great. Use it, if you have a wireless network. I suppose with all good and polished things come the downsides too, unfortunately. I have found kubuntu too slow to be able to use. Keep in mind that I need every bit of fast when using my 700mhz laptop, and all the functionality which is loaded comes at a price. Perhaps I haven’t found the best way to streamline the distro, but unless I can get it to a comparable speed to arch, I’ll probably have to return to my favourite type of i686 optimised packages: handrolled to perfection.