The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Linux Questions Thread: a bunch of pitfalls, but technically it's possible

Grey Ghost: Nov 25, 2005; If you stare into the Abyss long enough the Abyss stares back at you.

I have a laptop it's an older model IBM ThinkPad (A31 to be exact)
Pentium4 M 1.4Ghz with a 40 gig HDD and 1 Gig of ram (She may be old but she's my best pal :3:

)

Anyway I'm trying to get a good all around XP/Linux dual boot setup, a swiss army laptop so to speak. I've got my partitions all laid out and XP installed but I'm still deciding on a distro. I've setup Fedora on her before (ver. 4) but I want something that's much slimmer, I've also setup Gentoo before multiple times (mostly on impulse) and Gentoo has worked just fine but it's too high maintenance for me in my opinion especially for a "work" laptop.

Basically I'm looking for a distro that is slim and easy to manage package wise yet very tweakable. I�ll be using the laptop for data recovery and network security/diagnostic stuff, and maybe a bit of amateur python development.

I've been looking at Arch Linux and that seems to fit my criteria. Anyone have any comments on it?

One other slightly related question: anyone have any tips on setting the system up to use the drat UltraBay properly under Linux? i.e. swap drives without having to change a bunch of stuff around?

# ¿ Mar 29, 2007 07:55

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 20:23

Grey Ghost: Nov 25, 2005; If you stare into the Abyss long enough the Abyss stares back at you.

covener posted:

You'd probably be happier with something a little more mainstream that has a lot of eyes on it -- ubuntu or debian are obvious choices.

Yeah I was looking at Debian and (K)ubuntu as well, one of my greatest motivators is something minimal that I can install and build up on.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2007 05:19

Grey Ghost: Nov 25, 2005; If you stare into the Abyss long enough the Abyss stares back at you.

juggalol posted:

Swap stuff

well I'm on my laptop that has a gig of ram and a swap partition about 450MB in size and it (the swap) has never been touched. I'm pretty sure the old school swap rules don't apply anymore since we count RAM in gigs these days rather than just a few megs.

Just set it to 512 or even 128MB and you should be fine.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2007 17:00

Grey Ghost: Nov 25, 2005; If you stare into the Abyss long enough the Abyss stares back at you.

ExileStrife posted:

I'm using a laptop with Gentoo 2.6.17 to play a game, but the harddrive won't stay spinning. The game constantly hangs while the hard drive spins down, only to spin up again a few seconds later.

I've messed with everything I could in the very limited bios of the laptop with the hopes of turning off all 'power saving' features that might encourage it to kill the HD as fast as possible, but even on AC power, it doesn't seem to change.

Googling this only returns people wanting to -turn off- their hard drive when not in use. My laptop is already very good at that.

Is there a clever way (maybe a program already exists) to keep the hard drive spinning while the game is going, or at least a manually toggleable solution?

hdparm -S0 /dev/hda should disable the drive spin down feature

# ¿ Apr 4, 2007 05:17

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