Goodbye, Old Friends. Hello New Friend.

It is with great regret and a heavy heart that I have said goodbye to some old stalwarts round here. My beloved iBook has finally given up the ghost – seriously, it lasted this long – and it’s recent replacement, a second hand IBM T42 cobbled together from parts have all gone the way of all things and are now sitting in a crate waiting for me to break them down for working parts to sell on eBay.

I bit the bullet and came to the conclusion that although the IBM did technically still work, the way it would freeze and the display go crazy if you picked it up, the key feature of a laptop computer should be that you can move it while it’s on, so it’s off, and replaced with the machine I’m typing on now… a not too fancy Toshiba Satelite. Currently on special offer, and after staff discount came in at a reasonable £358. Not bad for an i3 quad core chip, 2GB RAM and a 320GB HHD.

But what follows is a epic tale of WTF when it came to installing an operating system of worth. Predictably of course, this slab of plain black plastic came pre-installed with Windows 7 Home Premium, (which the guy in the shop was enthusiastic about the Experience Score of 3.5 on a budget laptop*) with an extra Toshiba spin, including custom boot screens, a shed-load of bloat-ware, games, and some things that I just don’t know what they were… and within ten minuets of using it I couldn’t stand it any more; the constant pop-ups asking me to install this or enable that… all the pops and clicks from web pages, stupid noises whenever you did something and questions of ‘do you really want to do this?’ every time you install, change, do anything.
It had to go.

Enter my persistent install of Ubuntu 10.04LTS that I have on a pendrive I didn’t even think about running it live, just went straight for the install, because Ubuntu 10 is my favourite GNU/Linux distro – it works on anything, is pretty stable and looks great, what’s not to like? – but I was hasty to do so… the install hung at the very end, with a long stream on I/O Errors, so I killed the system and restarted. All good. Boots up fine. I get to the dsesktop and go to connect to the internet… but nothing in the menu bar was looking good. No WiFi adaptor present… that’s fine, I’ll enable the third-party drivers… but there were none. OK. Ethernet then until I find a patch for whatever the card is in this thing… no ethernet either. Break out iPad, google Toshiba C650 + ubuntu.

Ah.

Seems other people have this problem too; which is good news, it’s not just me.

Oh.

Doesn’t look good. In essence, it says that if you can get Ubuntu to run on your Toshiba, you’ll be plagued with fan issues, network adaptor problems and general incompatibility. The one main suggestion is to install SuSE.

Not happy. I’m not adverse to SuSE, but I’ve used Ubuntu for so long now that learning the ways and foibles of another distro seems like a bit of an arse, and why should I? Why is this Toshiba incompatible with one of the best OS’s in the world? IS there something amiss here… perhaps those bods over at Toshiba have something against we people that refuse to use Windows unless we REALLY HAVE TO – such as at work for our corporate network – but, after some pangs of returning it and admitting that I bought the wrong machine – I installed OpenSuSE, and I have to say that I’m pretty happy with it, actually. It certainly doensn’t have the gloss of Ubuntu, but everything works directly out the box, including WiFi and Ethernet. Installing stuff isn’t much different from U10, with a software centre, and .rpm’s replacing .deb for pre-packaged one-click installation of software. Now I’m no stranger to the command line, but if there’s a ready rolled version over a tarball, I’ll take the ready-rolled thanks. I’m a geek, but happy to be lazy. Overall, with the 62 bit install of SuSE it’s really snappy.

But can anyone get SKYPE or WINE to install? Maybe it’s because I’ve installed x62 and these are both x32 programs? Either way, that’s something to look at in the future. At the moment I’m happy with the computer and OpenSuSE…. but secretly I’d like Ubuntu back.

*Once I managed to get a word in edge ways and told him that I wasn’t going to run Windows he soon lost interest and said ‘well I’ll let you browse about for a bit’. Fine… Windows Boy.