How Vector Linux 5.9 breathed new life into a tired old laptop
Written by Steve Lawson
01.16.2008 at 08:41am
Section: Editorials It was the first laptop I ever bought and cost me as much as a small, secondhand car but there's always been something special about my old Dell 8000 Inspiron. It's certainly not the specs, at least by today's standards - an Asus Eee would knock it into a cocked Fedora. It runs on a 900Mhz mobile Pentium IIIl processor, has 512MB of RAM, an Nvidia mobile 2GO videocard, a 10GB hard disk and a CDROM drive and, er, that's about it. No ethernet, no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth.
What really made it special was its superb keyboard – the best I've ever used – and its display – a 15.4inch beauty that pumped out a crystal clear, brightly coloured desktop in full 1400x1050, eye-watering glory. That resolution has caused many a Linux distribution to fall over and admit defeat in the past, forcing me into repeated xorg.conf editing.
So much so, in fact, that quite some time ago, I simply stopped using the old girl as a Linux test machine and left it for the kids to play basic Windows games on.
But, as always, curiosity got the better of me (is it not curiosity that always kills the Linux cat?) and I began wondering how the 8000 would perform with one of the current crop of Linux distros famed for their speed and low resource requirements. You know the ones I mean, the Zenwalks, the Vectors and the DSLs of this world. I dismissed DSL because I just don't like it – it's great at what it does but it's just too basic to be comfortable.
Zenwalk was a strong candidate – I've used it a lot in the past and love the Xfce desktop it uses, although I'm not so fond of its netpkg software system. It had been a long time since I'd tried Vector Linux, so I decided to give it a go using the latest release, 5.9 Standard Gold. It proved to be a wise choice. 5.9 is based on Slackware 12, so you know it's going to be reliable.
But the extra 5.9 brings to the party is considerable and joyfully surprising. Fully-working browser plugins – so often the bane of my Linux life - include Flash, java, mp3, real media, Windows media, pdf and Quicktime. Then there's the choice of fully-customised Xfce 4.4.2, Fluxbox or Jwm. This is all built on top of X.org 7.3 and Linux kernel 2.6.22.14. And then you throw in the SeaMonkey Internet Suite 1.1.7, Firefox 2.0.0.11 and Opera 9.5.0 beta1, plus Abiword and Gnumeric for office tasks.
So, that's the marketing bit done (more info here), what about the install and configuration? Well, given Vector's Slackware heritage you know you're in for a text-driven install process. Fortunately, you also know it's going to be pretty straightforward so long as you read everything carefully and think before you click. It's a quick process, too, even on such an old machine and it was only a half-hour or so before I was sat staring at a shiny, new Xfce desktop.
To handle the traditional Slackware configuration faff, Vector have introduced their own suite of apps, now in full gui-glory – but quite possibly including the oddest-named tool in existence. I mean, who wouldn't pause before launching something called 'Vasm'? It sounds disturbingly gynaecological, doesn't it? What it stands for is Vector Administration and System Menu, and it contains the config tools for things such as Network, Hardware, Users, File system, X server and Services.
Pretty, it certainly isn't, but it does the job it's designed for admirably well. I'll return now to my earlier point about the 8000's display – Vector 5.9 configured it perfectly, first-time, without any intervention from me... result! The sound, too, was set up fine, as was the networking. My 8000 is connected to my router via a Linksys PCI/Ethernet adapter, which only required the network ESSID and WEP key to have me surfing – that's right, no fiddling, no tweaking.
There are wireless drivers and wi-fi configuration tools included, and I did have some success getting a Sitecom WL-113 54G wi-fi adaptor to work, but the 8000 is a heavy machine and wasn't likely to be moving beyond my home office much, so i stuck with the wired connection. So, that's everything present and working correctly – now we come to the fundamental point of this whole exercise: Namely, is Vector 5.9 useable on my old 8000? Is it ever!
My speed testing is no more scientific than a bloke with a stopwatch, but I recorded the following start-up times for the major applications I use in Vector:
GIMP – 8 seconds, including all plugins/extensions
Abiword – 5 seconds
Firefox – 10 seconds
Xmms – 3 seconds
Thunderbird – 6 seconds.
Not bad for such an old machine, eh? And what's more, with the streamlined Xfce running the desktop, accessing system menus is almost instantaneous. The Vector 5.9 desktop is also a nice place to be: They've used Vista-Inspirate icons for the panel and there's a nice range of Vector wallpapers to choose from. If the software you want isn't already included – and there's a very decent default selection – then Vector's repository will probably have it. As with Zenwalk, I'm not a huge fan of Vector's package manager, Gslapt. It's not very elegant nor easy to use, but it does its job passably well.
Even if Vector don't have the item you want, installing packages downloaded from elsewhere is a breeze, as I discovered when putting Tuxpaint on the 8000 for my kids (they're eight, by the way, and already know their way 'round the Vector desktop really well, which itself speaks volumes). To install non-Vector packages (in .tgz format), you simply right-click on the downloaded package and select 'Install package' and that's it, job done, menu icons and the lot.
I reckon installing Vector 5.9 on my 8000 has taken a good five years off the machine – it responds quicker to my commands than my other laptop, a two-year-old Dell Latitude X1 running Windows XP Professional on a faster, more modern processor. Imagine what Vector 5.9 could do for you if you're running a powerful, modern desktop machine – you'd have to nail it down!
|
