It's been awhile again since I last posted. I finally got brave enough to load linux on my new Toshiba Satellite laptop. You know how it goes, when something is brand new you don't want to mess with it too much. Well it only took two months for the new to wear off and for me to feel comfortable installing linux and dual booting with Vista. What distribution did I pick? well you would think I would load Ubuntu since I had no idea if all the hardware was compatable, but since I'm a linux nutcase and never take the easy way out, I decided to install Arch Linux. Arch has become my favorite distribution over the last several months do to its simplicity and great package management. I like to think of it as Slackware with a good package manager that takes care of all the dependencies. However, Arch takes longer for me to install and setup than does Slackware since after installation all you have is core linux. You need to install Xorg, a window manager, firefox, pretty much every application you want.
How did my Toshiba fare? Sweeeeet! All the hardware was recognized. I have intel video, atheros wireless, and realtek audio. All of these are supported by linux. After many hours of installing software and setting everything up, I now have a fast, minimal, Arch setup with DWM as the window manger and Apwal as my launcher. I did have to edit the config.h file before compiling dwm to make it a little more mouse friendly (like close windows with middle click and start apwal with right click on clock).
I have noticed my laptop seems to run cooler running linux over Vista. I think its due to vistas constant thrashing of the hard drive to update its indexing and high memory requirements for the Aero look. I am really happy with Arch and love how easy it is to keep it updated. I find it easier to configure than Debian. Ubuntu and other easy to use distributions are not my cup of tea, since they work well until you need to get to the nuts and bolts and then you find they are messier than they need to be. I am not fond of distributions that are built on other distributions...since you find they sometimes deviate from the way the original distro set things up. Anyway thats all for now...next time I write, everything will probably have changed.
