Back when I first started learning Linux and BSD, I went through a series of cranky machines, mostly used in part or in whole. I began giving them names based on some previous theme I had back in the military, using names to suggest noises and such. My first real usable box was named thud. A laptop was snap, and there was a crunch, wham, and bam.
Then my wife decided to replace her cranky old Pavilion with something better. Frankly, that 1.8Ghz Celeron was the fastest thing I ever used. Back in those days, I named it crater. I finally had enough income to build one, then eventually traded up to an even faster dual-core 64. I gave crater to my son. He used it some for a while, then we recently traded him up one, and I got the old Pavilion back after three years away.
Since then I’ve changed themes to something more subtle and religious. I’ve named it now rest, to offset the Inspiron laptop named journey. Yeah, my Konsole prompt says, ed@rest>.
It took a few tries to find a usable Linux. I knew FreeBSD would work, because that was the last thing I had put on it before my son insisted on XP. But I wanted to see if there was anything that could still identify the strange hardware and behavior of this cranky old HP. CentOS insisted it could go into hibernate, which didn’t work out well. Neither Etch nor Lenny would install, locking up on the package installation. Nothing in openSUSE would work, either. I kept getting a plain console installation. Most everything choked on the Intel 855G graphics chipset.
Finally, I got Kubuntu 8.04 to work. That’s what I’m using right now, and I was delighted to find it had been bumped up to KDE 3.5.10. It’s working fine, and I get to keep this for awhile.
Resting in the old crater….
