Monday, November 12, 2007

Fluxbuntu 7.10

Long time readers may remember the saga of my old laptop (a Compaq Presario 1700T circa 2000). I had ditched openSUSE several months ago in favor of Fluxbuntu, a variant of Ubuntu which used the light weight Fluxbox windowing system in place of the Gnome desktop. My old computer has only 128 megabytes of RAM, so memory is at a very high premium. With the release of Gutsy Gibbon, Fluxbuntu picked up a few new features, so I upgraded and gave it a try. I have been extremely pleased. All the good stuff is there that I enjoyed before (installing new free software using Synaptic or Aptitude, Firefox, XMMS, etc.) but there were a couple of great new additions. For one, automounting of USB drives. I have a small pen drive that I carry around to hold many of my files: music, programming projects, etc. Mounting had always been a bit of a pain with my laptop's OS. Now I just plug it in, it mounts, and an icon for the drive appears on my desktop.

The discovery came at a perfect time. My in-laws decided they wanted to resurrect an old PC so they could browse the web side by side. All they really needed was Firefox, Open Office, and Picasa and their computer had the same amount of RAM as my old laptop (probably from about the same time frame). Fluxbuntu to the rescue ;-) Can you believe it, my in-laws are running Linux.

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