It’s been a little over a year since I reviewed the first Peppermint OS, and while I liked the first effort on this new project, I’ve been really looking forward to Peppermint Two. Well, my wait was over as of last week, so I was able to kick the tires and get a good feel for it after installing and using it for a few days.
And it didn’t disappoint!
A few weeks ago, I made a post here talking about what I’m doing lately in technology (cleverly labeled “What I’m doing lately in technology” ;)) and some of the comments on it really got me thinking about the approach that I have been taking on the specs for my next desktop computer will/should be. What am I going to use it for? Do I really NEED as much modularity as I’ve always insisted upon in the past? Should I be thinking “sleek, powerful, and small”, rather than “big, modular, and does everything”?
So I thought I’d sort some of this out here, by doing some thinking out loud, and hopefully getting some feedback from the rest of you.
Dear Dell,
I know that in the past you have offered a handful of paltry Ubuntu options, though I confess I don’t understand why you bothered at all.
With the exception of your two netbook offerings, I have yet to have seen you offer anything else that indicates to me that you have any intentions to make Ubuntu a real option for your customers.
Oh, I know… for a while you offered Ubuntu on your Inspiron 15n laptop, and there was even an XPS M1330 notebook for a brief time available on your website.
But both of those were very limited in what was available for CPU options and RAM upgrades. Even the desktop option you offered for a little while was an underpowered, unimpressive castoff compared to what’s available elsewhere on Dell.com.
This isn’t so much a review, just a rambling discussion on what comes to mind for me about Ubuntu after using it on my laptop for three months or so. I decided against writing a conventional “review” of Ubuntu… seems like there are enough of those, so I don’t see the value of it.
But I do see some value in a rambling discussion on the subject, so here goes.
A good friend of mine and fellow technology wizard has on several occasions brought up Synergy as a great solution for doing work spanning a couple of local workstations.
I know I have several times added it to my “Mental List Of Apps To Try”, but somewhere along the way I forgot about it. Last weekend Jered was over at my house for dinner and he brought it up again, and this time I installed it.
To make a long story short: I should have been playing with Synergy a long time ago!
For those who like to read a little bit more than that, continue, because I have a writeup.
I’ve told this story to a lot of people who have asked me why I use an old-and-crusty distro like Slackware. I do have some pretty good reasons, and most of them lie in this tale.
A long, long time ago — back in 1999 or so — I had a computer that gave me nothing but trouble. It was one which I had bought from a vendor that did business with my employer then, so I got it for cheap. It was a Pentium 3 450 MHz (slot CPU, not socket!) machine with 256 Mb of RAM and a 10 GB hard drive, in a nice coffee-stain beige tower. When I bought it I also bought a Windows 98se license (and they actually shipped it with the full install media!!!!! Remember back in the days when computer vendors still did that?), and that’s what I set up on it when I got it.
Everybody’s got an opinion, and I’m no different. After reading Trent’s piece yesterday, I thought I’d add my two cents as my partitioning scheme is quite complex (though I can think of several ways to make it worse). For newbies, some of this is unlikely something to try, but you might want to read anyway to get an idea of what can be done.
For starters, I have 1GB of physical RAM, and 4GB of swap space split over two drives. I have two 120GB drives that I use for my primary system that are split into 8 partitions (and a logical ninth). Most of these partitions mirror (RAID-1) each other so that if one drive fails, the other maintains the system until I can replace it. You may note that the swaps are not mirrored, but both swaps and the md08 array are encrypted. Like Trent, I intended a dual boot with Windows, so the first partition on sda is NTFS. (Of course, I haven’t actually had a Windows OS on that partition in about two years, but it’s nice to know I have it if I find a game that won’t play nice in Wine.) Also note that /boot is a mirrored partition, which keeps the data safe, but upon bootup the boot loader (LILO/GRUB) accesses only one of the two drives (i.e., sda3, not md3).
One Linux topic on which everybody seems to have an opinion is partitioning. “What’s the best way to partition my system?” newbies ask, and if they do so in a public Linux forum frequented by experienced penguin techies, they are bound to get at least a dozen answers, many of them completely different from each other.
So what is the best way? Simple. Whichever way you find works best for you.
When I first started out with Linux, I didn’t know either, and I did a lot of reading on the subject, and as a result I created a partitioning scheme that works best for me, and that’s still more or less what I stick with.
With my recent Ubuntu installation I didn’t do any manual partitioning, mostly because for one, I wasn’t planning on dual-booting that laptop with anything else, and for another, I wanted to accept the defaults so that I could see what Ubuntu does on its own.
However, when I’m setting up a Slackware machine, I have a method that I follow.
One word of caution. If you’re setting up your partitions presumably to hold a Linux installation, write down what you’re designating what (i.e., “hda1 = Windows”, “hda5 = swap”, “hda7 = root”, et al) so that you have it to refer to when you’re installing later. Nothing quite like coming to the point in the install where it asks you “where do you want to mount your home directory?” and you don’t remember which partition you created with /home in mind.
Been there, done that.
The Linux Critic 