Penultimate Reality

I’m currently the owner of an old Thinkpad 760ED, a very old laptop. For comparison purposes, it has a 133Mhz Pentium processor and 48 megabytes of RAM. It’s certainly not high-powered, but might be good for something. I have no idea what.

Long story short, a couple of years ago, I managed to install Gentoo on the thing, and it ran fine (for some definition of fine–it was difficult to compile anything, as I had set it up using another computer to compile binary packages). A couple of days ago, I decided to revive it and install Debian on it, since that would be marginally more effective. (It’s run Debian before.) Unfortunately, the Debian install CD was refusing to recognize the hard drive and CD-ROM drive.

Eventually, I discovered that I had to manually modprobe the ide-generic module. My, that’s inconvenient. In any case, Debian’s happily installing now (over the blisteringly fast 115.2k serial link, no less). There are plenty of other quirks about using this laptop, but I should probably save them for some sort of book on the horrors of buying IBM. At least I got the thing for free.

Lately, I’ve been playing around with Debian sid in a virtual machine (VirtualBox is now my virtual machine of choice) for reasons that are entirely beyond me. That said, it looks like it could be potentially useful as a desktop system. I only worry about what kind of breakage I might experience. It’d be nice to get some feedback on perhaps some best practices for maintaining a sid-based system. But I guess you might want some background first…

I’ve become increasingly bored with maintaining my Gentoo machines. This culminated with me reinstalling Ubuntu on my laptop a few weeks ago, At this point, I don’t even notice except that I am no longer repeatedly compiling packages every day. The biggest thing I’ve noticed is that package versions are sometimes a little outdated (which is to be expected, given Ubuntu’s six month update cycle). This led me to examine what versions of packages are in the sid repository of Debian. As it turns out, it’s quite updated, with new versions of packages appearing very quickly. It’s led me to believe it might be all right for a desktop system.

My desktop system is rapidly becoming obsolete, and it slowly feels slower and slower as time goes on. (It’s using an AMD Athlon XP 1600+ which was originally purchased in late 2002.) Keeping the copy of Gentoo I have running on it up to date is increasingly becoming a dull procedure, and given my penchant for micromanagement… In any case, I’m slowly coming around to consider installing Debian on it, though I don’t know if I want to risk breaking it. After all, it isn’t broken, and I intend on replacing it within the next year. Maybe I just play around too much…

I could always just install Linux from Scratch. That’d be great for a laugh.

(By the way, if any of you happen to be looking for shared web hosting, consider buying from me at www.calindora.com. Why, you ask? I got tired of seeing hosting companies (probably dishonestly?) offering 600GB or 34TB or whatever amounts of disk space they’re claiming to offer these days. I feel bad for anyone who actually intends to try to use all that space.)