My struggle with getting small Linux distros installed on my laptop

Fri Sep 7 00:27:30 UTC 2012

I would have stuck with mint/xfce, but I found the overall speed to be 
slow. If I had  a larger SSD drive, I probably would have used it. The 
combination of Mint/Gnome and Mint/xfce (more so with Gnome) caused my 
mouse to be too jumpy and out of control, which was a major factr in 
choosing Manjaro Linux/xfce, which had a small footprint and a stable 
mouse.

Manjaro had a unique "problem" in that the video driver it chose to 
load when I asked for a non-free driver, was a test driver. There was a 
watermark on the lower right of the screen saying "AMD testing use 
only", containing the AMD logo. Someone at the Manjaro forums showed me 
a sed/awk hack that got rid of the watermark, and now I have a system 
that is a bit more presentable and a lot more liveable. Manjaro suffers 
a bit from the fact that it is quite new (my version is 0.8.0), and a 
lot of files are located in non-standard places, such as having most 
conf files and passwd files under the root account (/root) (including 
what should be /etc/passwd). No ordinary user can see files in /root.

My manjaro distro, after installing Python libs and some office goodies 
(like LibreO) is around 5.4 Gigs.

Paul King

--------------------------------------------------
On 6 Sep 2012 at 2:42, Marc Lijour wrote:

How do you find the Mint Debian edition? I am looking for a rolling 
distribution, but I am concerned about losing compatibility with Ubuntu 
and its large repositories. 
Thanks 
Marc

2012/9/4 Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>
    On Tue, Sep 04, 2012 at 01:46:08PM -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
    > On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 08:37:22PM -0400, Christopher Browne wrote:
    > > I'd be curious as to how stock Debian compares... It can certainly be
    > > tiny, more so than most options out there.
    > >
    > > Expected challenges to me would be...
    > > - might need to pull custom kernel to support hardware, as Debian has a
    > > tendency to elderly kernels in stable releases
    > > - I'm not sure WiFi support is necessarily what all would term "friendly"
    > > (mind you, haven't tried that lately, so I could be surprised)
    > > - not sure what out-of-box touch sense you're likely to get
    > >
    > > But I'd expect "office" software to be handled pretty happily. And you can
    > > have *any* window manager you want, including plenty of obscure ones! :-)
    >
    > I don't find Debian difficult to get on a laptop and working, but of
    > course some laptops have unsupported hardware that makes things harder.
    >
    > If you want life to be simple, try mint. My wife tried it on her ideapad
    > and everything just works it seems. Quite something to see for a linux
    > install. 

That is, the mint linux debian edition.

--
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.   Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists 

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists