hardware

Installing minimal #!CrunchBang linux on old Sony laptop

The 8 years old notebook (Vaio R505TLK) desperately needed some system refresh. The original Windows 2000 was more or less fine but up to date it become cluttered and quite unstable. I do have some sentimental feelings for the thing as it was working for me for quite a long time and helped to learn and achieve a lot. Now it is mostly a backup notebook for sudden guests without computers on them.

After a bit of research and pre/re/over/install parties with some other Linux distributions I stopped with #!CrunchBang Linux. A nicely put together slimmed down xubuntu version with OpenBox as window manager. It's quite a minimalist eye-candy for me as a designer, and most importantly it has great, very active community. And well... it works quite fast on Celeron 650 with 192RAM.

VMWare Fusion 2, Windows 2000, Omnikey 3121. It takes three to tango.

I can not say I was exactly pissed off by this situation. But I would say inadequate "user experience" was guaranteed. Well. It took me more then an hour but I payed for my 3G connection while away from WinXP VMs on my external HD. One thing is that VMWare somehow degraded the product for older OS with new major update. The other is why smart guys at e-bank use Windows only compatible "security" software at all which is not so needed in the real world. It is just unprofessional (though it looks like). I understand that developing "hardware enabled software security system" will attract a larger budget but isn't it about end user convenience anyway?