Well, I finally went ahead and did it — I wiped the hard drive on our laptop and installed Linux. It was about that time, as it took Windows 2000 nearly 10 minutes to completely boot, and with the iMac (and Office for Mac), we didn’t really have any good reason to keep a copy of Windows around.

I was really expecting an adventure, figuring that at least one piece of hardware on the laptop (an older Dell Inspiron 7500) wouldn’t play nice with Linux. Well, I was partially right. First, I tried to install Slackware, but that crashed and burned quite early, the installer complaining that it couldn’t find a driver for the PCMCIA cards (despite the fact that when autoprobing for drivers, the driver the NIC needed scrolled by on the screen. Oh well…next….

I had downloaded Mandrake’s 9.2 beta release, and figured I’d give that a shot too, since it had the latest and greatest Gnome packaged with it. The install went well, and it found and activated the PCMCIA NIC. w00t! Then the troubles began. Something went all wrong with the Window Manager, and while X11 would start just fine, I could only log into an X-Term session, which just isnt’ exciting enough on its own. After tweaking the configurations, I managed to get the Window Manager working about half the time, but I decided enough was enough (and knowing that the issue probably had something to do with the beta release), I gave up again and tried Mandrake 9.1.

This install went fine, but it couldn’t find the NIC driver modules. After spending an evening reading newsgroup posts, I thought I had it all figured out, but nothing seemed to work. At this point I started to download the latest version of Red Hat, but I thought I’d give 9.2 another try….

And, it worked. The X11 installer managed to do everything correctly, and here I am, adding this post on my Linux laptop. There are only two problems so far….

1. Mozilla Firebird can’t seem to find the right fonts. Even the application fonts are system courier fonts, which look terrible.

2. And related to this, I can’t get Flash 6 installed properly. I believe there’s a font package I just don’t have, and can’t seem to find. I don’t think I’m going to spend too much stressing over this though, considering the full release of 9.2 should be out soon, and that should fix many of the problems.

Posted on 16 August 2003