An experiment
2012-10-12 21:27:55.373224+02 by ebwolf 0 comments
I'm in Portland this week for State of the Map US and NACIS. Since I'm not travelling officially for the US Geological Survey, I can't use either the government-owned laptop or netbook I usually carry. And since I haven't owned a laptop myself since 2006, I was at a quandry. I really didn't want to buy a new laptop just yet, so I dug out the vintage Toshiba Satellite that I paid about $300 for in 2006 and my wife retired a year ago, upgraded the RAM and put in an SSD with a fresh install of Ubuntu 12.04 Desktop. I also added an IOGear Bluetooth adapter, a generic USB 801.11n adapter, and a replacement battery.
So far everything is really snappy. The SSD means boot times are super fast. It also means swap space is a little more reasonable. Chrome is pretty much unusable but, oddly, Chromium works just fine. I will stick to Firefox for now.
I have QGIS setup and my Python develoment environment. If this machine proves to sluggish, I have Remmina remote desktop setup to connect over SSH to a virtual machine at home with more horse power.
This is an experiment because I haven't gone for this long in a Linux-only environment in over a decade. It's great to see how well Linux works with common hardware. And love or hate Unity, Ubuntu is a huge improvement over the Linux desktop environments I've used in the past.