Best *nix OS for a laptop?

[John Mills]

Eric, Freebies -

I ended up with Linux for some specific reasons. YMMV.

On Sat, 2004-03-20 at 17:42, Eric F Crist wrote:

> Could some of you please send me an email telling me what OS you utilize on 
> your laptop, and why?  I'm not looking for anyone bashing any other OS, just 
> why you use what you do.

I am working on a Linux development project, have very limited funds, and 
spend many weekends out of town. I was given an elderly Toshiba (430CDT) 
that was a casualty of the class-action suit a few years ago, about their 
handling of CPU and/or BIOS problems. I wanted a setup that would parallel 
the code development environment of my RH-7.3/X11 Linux setup.

I expanded the RAM to 49 MBy but was still unable to run any installer I
could find for a RedHat setup. ('Slinky' bit me viciously.)

I was able to run the Slackware-9.1 Linux console installer without
problems, and by being very careful I even fitted a few frills into the
system's 1.2 GBy HDD. It generally works (sllooowwwlly), though I
sometimes crash my X session when some app ties up the resources (i.e.,
there seems to be a minimum hardware base for stability and I'm not
_quite_ there). Otherwise it meets my requirements perfectly. I'm typing
this now by SSH login to my home system over a [miserable] dial-up
account, and at home I put it on my LAN and it works fine. X11 takes a
long time to start, but is responsive once it's going. I use WindowMaker
because KDE and GNOME are pretty much out of the question with so little
RAM: they swap all the time and KDE takes _many_ seconds to even find a
keystroke. WM is fine. I didn't try other lightweight window managers
('fvwm', 'fluxbox', ...), but any of them would probably have worked out.

I installed from a boot floppy and CDs of the packages. I expect to
install future Linux systems from Slackware after about 6 years of RedHat
(though my early setups were Slackware). Naturally I'm heavily influenced
by my anecdotal experience.

I don't have sound working, and the only power management is screen 
blanking, c/o XFree86.

I am sure I could have installed a good freeBSD configuration; I recently 
installed FBSD by ftp in a junker desktop that didn't even have a CD 
drive. As soon as the Linux project works I plan to port it to FBSD due 
to its fine reputation as a server environment, but the client asked for 
Linux and I have more development experience (and a good working setup) in 
Linux.

Bottom line: I got what I needed, but my limited hardware and specific use
had a lot to do with the path I took.

Regards.
 - John Mills
   john.m.mills at alum.mit.edu