With the release of Precise Pangolin, Lucid Lynx's (Netbook Remix) days on my old Asus EEE900 netbook are numbered. It wasn't clear that Precise would run well on this old hardware (Celeron, 1GB RAM, 16GB SSD, dual booting XP) and I wasn't keen on the ongoing UI simplifications in Ubuntu so I decided to switch to Crunchbang Statler. CLI holds no terror for me and I would benefit from the tons of up to date Debian packages.
The install from USB stick using unetbootin was anti-climatic. The whole process has been described here so I won't repeat that. The only hitch was when I forgot the 1GB USB stick I first tried has a weird "floppy" partition which the netbook tried to boot from. I succeeded when I used a more conventional 1GB USB stick, actually a broken USB MP3 player.
The result is a much more responsive netbook. I can even watch videos using VLC streaming over WiFi from a Samba share; this used to struggle on Lucid UNR. Mounting the Samba share was quite easy. The applications in Crunchbang may not be as integrated as on Ubuntu, but all the applications and connectivity options are there if you are willing to use the keyboard shortcuts instead of insisting on icons everywhere. It also shows how much more friendly Debian is these days when there is a bit of UI facade.
I think I will be quite happy to take the netbook on my next travels until I find a pad and BT keyboard combo that I like.
No comments:
Post a Comment