Thinkpads Forum

I am running Xubuntu on an IBM T21 & the display is not crisp but dull & blocky, some colours are out of focus, skewed. Is there any propriety drivers to try? None show up in Hardware Drivers. I've long suspected screen looks a bit duff compared to Win2k, but it is only in the cold morning light I can see clearly, usually being a night owl. 800 x 600 magnifies the problem horribly!

Anyone else running a *buntu varient?

Boy! Windows is just as bad! I need glasses and/or my screen needs a clean. Seriously never up this time usually.

Looking for problems where there is none, AGAIN!

Ubuntu and its derivatives tend to be on the heavy side of things, so they're probably not the best choice for resource-constrained systems.

If your ready to graduate from the Linux with training wheels that Ubuntu is, I highly recommend ArchLinux. It is a great distro, with plenty of support a large internet following and can run all the programs Ubuntu can. Since I just re-did my tower at home I loaded the latest version on there and boy does it scream. My system specs are:

Intel C2D E7500 2.93GHz
4GB DDR2 800MHz RAM
3 x 320 WD SATA II HD's
SATA DVD-Burner
ATI X850 PE PCI-E 16x w/ 256MB DDR3 RAM
Dual Acer AL1915 19" 1280x1024 LCD's

This sucker screams in both Windows 7 64 and Archlinux. With my next paycheck I am going to replace the video card with an ATI 58xx series card. That will bring my WEI score to 6.9 total and allow me to dial up the settings more in the few games I play. The linux advantages will be that I don't have to hack up flgrx to support my card.

Now there is nothing wrong with Ubuntu per se, but it is one of the more "heavy" linux distros. I prefer to start with a nice slim but functional OS and build it as my needs fit. It is very possible to do this with Ubuntu, but with such a large array of various distributions available these days I like to play around with them and see what I like. The debian based distro's are the ones I prefer although I used to be a die hard SuSE man and still recommend their software to many people.

I will tell you this though. I used to love KDE. God it was awesome.

Then along came KDE4 and those annoying plasmoids.

Thank god gnome is looking good otherwise I might be running Afterstep or Enlightenment as my window manager. I can only handle so much UI bling. I've dialed down Windows 7 UI a bit and while I love Areo to death I set it to a nice grey theme which is easy on these tired eyes.

Arch is a little... intense, no?

Rolling release distros have their place, but I'm not sure that place is directly after something like Ubuntu. Perhaps Debian might be a better choice of a "next step"? It can be lean like Arch, but it has a (fairly) regular release cycle and (in my experience) is much, much less prone to breakage.

Going straight to Arch from Ubuntu is a "wide" step. Consider Zenwalk or Salix with Xfce as a "middle" step. We ran Zenwalk on a x31 and it performed very well.

I tried several distros and always ended up back at Zenwalk because it "felt tight", "lean", and it used xfce (the benefit of the right click menu access).

Now I use Arch with xfce on my x200 with only the necessary programs for my use. Arch is a top notch distro!

I've tried Zenwalk, and honestly I didn't find it all that great compared to a lean Debian install with XFCE. What it gained in "UNIX-ness", it lost in ease of deployment and management -- I think APT and dpkg make life *much* easier, and distributions without them to be much less convenient. To each their own though. Slackware never really "clicked" for me (though I used to run it on my desktop c. 2003), and once I got used to Debian-like distros I found it hard to go back.

Generally, I want my machine to work reliably and with a minimum of fiddling. Debian and (previously) Ubuntu gave me that. Slackware, though certainly more educational and more traditional, required a much more hands-on approach than I was comfortable with. Of the half dozen or so Debian boxes I've got in my house at the moment, only one has ever required that I edit a configuration file by hand. In contrast, I've never had a Slackware install that *didn't* require a trip to /etc.

All that said, if my goal were to learn the ins-and-outs of how a Linux distro works, Slackware or Arch would definitely be amongst my top picks.

I've never tried Zenwalk. I'll have to toss it in a VM and give it a whirl.