Zac Garrett

For the last week I have been playing heavily with different Linux distributions as I screwed up my laptop as stated in my previous post.

What I am looking for in an operating system:

• XFCE 4.4 - The beta version of XFCE is far superior to the stable version
• Package Management - needs to resolve dependencies and not break other packages
• Above all else, the ability to install on my laptop which is a HP zv5000

I really do not think my demands are all that high. One might think that just about any Linux or BSD version should do the trick.

The first distro I tried was Gentoo as I have heard by many security experts that it is the way to go. The install is far from easy, but I did not expect that. Due to the fact that everything in gentoo compiles on your computer rather than using binary files (rpm or deb) the install took two days to fully install on my laptop. The installer even got corrupt when I was installing so I had to continue via command line. Once I finally got XFCE installed and setup I quickly found out that it was version 4.2 rather than 4.4. After a bit of reading I found out how to upgrade to the newer version. I soon upgraded the entire system and XFCE suddenly downgraded itself. I am sure it was a setting that I made to do this, but it took 4 hours to get it back to 4.4 and it would not fully install still. Eventually I gave up to try something different.

My next endeavor was openBSD. I had been running it successfully in VMware for a month or so prior to this, so I knew what I was getting myself into. I quickly learned that my laptop as a problem with aspi that controls the extra buttons on the laptop, like volume and the like. The issue is that any BSD does not boot properly because of this. That means no BSD’s, which stinks.

I decided to give slackware a go once again. I quickly came to a problem, my laptop’s internal CD drive died a while back. So, I have to use an external USB drive. Slackware’s installer does not support this and I could not find anything about supporting it anywhere. I tried a few different methods to get it to install, after a while I decided I need to just get my laptop back up and running.

After a week of downtime I just wanted to get my laptop back up and running. So, I decided to go back to xubuntu. I went with the Alpha version Feisty Fawn because I couldn’t stand going back to stable version after being down for a week. Mark Shuttleworth is a very smart guy for creating such a usable product. Ubuntu, it is just too easy to use compared to everything else out there.

This past Friday I decided to dual boot my laptop with gentoo. I had been running xubuntu and I wanted to move over to Gentoo eventually. After running gparted overnight to repartition my hard drive I started the Gentoo livecd.

The installer in Gentoo was quite easier than what I had read in the past. I believe the GTK installer is fairly new and not many people recommend using it, which I found out after the fact. Anyways, after I got done doing the configuration script I hit the install button. After a few seconds I see it trying to partition the hard drive, even though I did not change any of the partitioning schemes. This was the point that I saw the end all of errors, “Install Failed”.

The installer had failed partitioning the hard drive and corrupted all of the partition data. This means that the computer does not know how to read what partition is where on the hard drive. Thinking back there are ways to fix this, but I was not thinking that clearly at that moment so I acted hastfully and just restarted the Gentoo installer and let it take over the entire drive.

Moral of this horror story, back everything up! I back everything important up to two seperate places. One copy goes to my local file server and another copy to my remote server. This can be a pain if you forget to move a file to all locations, but you will always have a backup copy somewhere if your drive fails (or you screw it up yourself).