stuart test blog

My laptop has been slowly dying over the last few months – first the edge of the screen frame cracked and worsened to the point of having to prop the screen up against something solid when in use; then it got knocked off the dining room table and cracked the corner of the case – could have been a lot worse; now the hard drive has died and I’m reluctant to spend any more money on it getting it fixed.

The lack of hard drive hasn’t prevented me from using it thought. I’ve tried out bootable Linux live CD’s from Knoppix and Ubuntu to be able to browse the web from the lounge. Both are good but the Knoppix CD is by far the more powerful of the two. But then again, Knoppix are specialists in bootable CD’s whereas Ubuntu provide a live CD just to test out their distribution. One problem I had with both of them is that I couldn’t eject the CD after booting to be able to play a DVD. I was hoping that they would load the software into RAM instead of just constantly accessing the CD – with 64oMB of RAM in my laptop, I thought it would be able to run completely from memory. Maybe there’s a setting or another live CD that can do this but I haven’t found it yet. If I was going to run Linux on a desktop at home, I would probably go with Ubuntu for its ease of use and the huge amount of software available through the Debian repositry.

But the point of this post was just to mention that the reason why I haven’t posted much lately is that my laptop is busted and I don’t have anything else to work on home that doesn’t frustrate me by being too slow.