I’m not sure why, but after testing Lenny several different ways, Etch is still better. In fact, Lenny is downright inferior.
After messing around with Ubuntus, Lenny, then Win2K, then XP, then openSUSE 10.3, I’m back to Etch. I just found out the other day it’s still being supported under the Debian scheme of “old-stable.” The patches will continue until about February 2010. That’s very good news, because Lenny can’t hold a candle to Etch.
On this Inspiron 4100, Etch installed faster, more accurately identified the hardware, and did a much better job of configuring it. Lenny was bloated and slow on this machine, and Etch is the fastest thing I’ve tried so far. Even after adding the later kernel from Backports, it’s still zippy as can be, and it handles my cheap Linksys cards better than Lenny. In fact, I didn’t have to diddle with the setup as I did with Lenny; Etch immediately gave me the chance to run it from the GNOME interface. Best of all, it seemed to stay connected better.
I can’t say why Lenny is inferior to its predecessor, but it is painfully obvious on this laptop. Being this thing isn’t exposed all the much to the Net, I may keep Etch after it’s support expires, just because it works so well. Let’s not forget: I don’t give a rat’s patootie for what’s latest and greatest in Linux. Having something actually work, allowing me to get work done, is better than all the bells and whistles you can offer. The main reason for wanting to move from XP was it had gotten bog slow, as bad as Lenny had been. Etch was up and ready to fly in less than one hour, and completely customized to my liking, including added packages, etc., in less than a day.
That’s the way it should be.
That’s certainly fascinating. So much for progress, eh?
hello,
etch is better for you ! for me, lenny is better ! lenny is a very good distribution. for me, on my laptop or on my PC, just one hour of configuration. on my laptop, all works “out of the box”, also webcam !
you have no reasons to say why etch is better.
@+ petitbob
I’ll give some room for English being a foreign language to you, Petitbob; I’d do far worse in French. Yes, I did leave out a lot of things, but Etch is superior still. I used it and Lenny on several different machines, including a PPC, in pure 64-bit mode, etc. Etch sets up X properly, while Lenny consistently did nothing at all with X. I had to run a separate post-install process to make X work at all.
That alone makes Etch superior, but there is the problem of the wifi setup. Lenny had to be configured manually; Etch used it immediately without any intervention. And so on it went. In every case, Etch was more automated, and more accurately automated on every device I tested.
If Lenny reflects the way Debian is going, we are in for a Dark Ages in my favorite distro.
“If Lenny reflects the way Debian is going, we are in for a Dark Ages in my favorite distro.”
Lenny probably reflects the way GNU/Linux is going — things change fast, sometimes for better but sometimes for worse. I think the goal for Xserver development is that in the near future it should do all the configuration automatically, but it’s not there quite yet.
You could probably make both Etch and Lenny faster and more responsive if you took the time and effort to tweak them a bit. Debian’s kernels are tuned for server use, not for desktop use so you might want to recompile the kernel with options tweaked for desktop use and for your computer’s specific processor.
Try running Xorg with 16 bit depth instead of the default 24 depth. Disable any unnecessary services. Install the “prelink” program and enable it. Mount your filesystems with “noatime” option; some say that filesystem journaling eats system resources, so you could try mounting your filesystems as ext2 instead of ext3.
There are many other things you can try if you want more performance out of an old, slow computer. Search Google for Linux performance tweaks and tips.
Thanks catnap, but I no longer pursue Linux as a hobby. After 12 years of chasing the impossible, I’ve grown weary of it all. It has to work pretty much out of the box, because that’s what all my clients expect. Etch offers all I need for a what little work I’m willing to do. If Lenny takes that much tweaking to work properly on this laptop, I might as well use FreeBSD. It gives back a lot more for the work you put into it.
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