My brother’s Win XP laptop died. He has limited computer needs, really just needs to use some web applications like Facebook, Yahoo mail, Hulu and Youtube. In the past he has had significant virus issues under Windows and I’ve been proposing to him for years to move over to Linux. This happenstance caused him to be finally open to it.
This HP laptop is fairly old, it has an old AMD mobile processor, USB 1.1 and no built-in wireless hardware. This meant that the operating system had to be fairly lightweight to make this solution work well. I personally use Linux Mint (currently Mint 11/Gnome) as my own desktop and was aware of the new Debian Edition of Mint, which is available in a version using the Xfce desktop (again, lightweight resource use) which I thought would be very suitable. Plus, I wanted to get more personal experience with Debian. 😉
So I launched a project to install Mint LMDE Xfce edition on this machine. This proved to be quite difficult. For some reason, the installer would run extremely slowly – but curously, would speed up if I kept the mouse moving. But seeing as I only discovered that the second time around, once the installer had run overnight the first time around, that was little help. I ended up installing LMDE twice, because the first time it would not work properly. The second time worked, and the machine was quite nice and snappy, despite the paltry resources of this machine.
So all was good, and I got things set up well and everything he would need to use was working. Delivered the unit, he was happy. Great. Project over…
Not quite. A few days later I hear he is having trouble. It is difficult to troubleshoot remotely because there seems to be some sort of permissions issue that is preventing him from running even the tools I would normally use to connect to the machine from my home. It was almost as if SELinux was somehow in play and blocking stuff, but it had all worked before and I did not create his account with privs to change anything sensitive.
I never did get LMDE back working on the machine. Instead I chose to reinstall from scratch using Linux Mint 11 LXDE. That went smoothly (and much quicker!) and the machine has been running trouble-free since. And I was smart enough to create an image of the install this time as a backup to slap back on the machine should he have any other problems. Everything will be right back to working state in just a few minutes.
In all fairness, Mint LMDE is new and “not for your average user”, so my having trouble is really not that unexpected. I’d hoped to be able to get it running and stable and then lock it down from any changes that would destabilize it, but that proved to be insufficient. I really do want to move to a Debian base to avoid the major reinstalls periodically required with Ubuntu-based systems (Debian systems have “rolling” upgrades which keep fresh without the need to reinstall) but I think that will be best attempted with my own desktop or netbook in the future. Best to keep the others I support on the more frequently traveled path.