Apocalypse Now!

Posted by Jesco Freund at Nov. 2, 2009 6:47 p.m.

I was looking for an open source operating system for a very old notebook (Pentium 3 generation with only 256 MB of memory). With these performance characteristics on the computer side and a general lack of time on my side in mind, I defined the following criteria:

• Binary packages – compiling X or a libc on that old thing would have been a nightmare
• Full disk encryption support (it's a mobile device I carry around a lot…)
• Preconfigured lightweight desktop environment (the time factor…)

The potential candidates were OpenBSD, FreeBSD, CentOS and Arch Linux. For OpenBSD, I couldn't figure out how to set up fully encrypted disks. FreeBSD (although in general my favored OS) relies too much on source distribution (I know there are packages, but they are often behind the ports tree) and doesn't provide a pre-configured desktop (DesktopBSD and PC-BSD do, but their installation routines do not support disk encryption). CentOS is rock solid and the only Linux I would ever put on a server again, but its desktop configuration is fat and the installer doesn't support disk encryption. Arch Linux again failed by not providing any pre-configured desktop and a tendency to have kernels that panic on the relevant computer. The pre-configured collections offered by Ubuntu and descendants were too fat for my taste, and furthermore I do not like Ubuntu for a couple of other reasons.

Well, what happened – I got landed with Debian Linux. The installer does everything for me (erase the disk, fill it with random bullshit, configure LVM with dm-crypt), and Debian also provides a pre-configured LXDE desktop environment. I cannot promise that this will end as a “happily ever after” story, but for the moment, Debian fulfills my requirements.

1 comment | Defined tags for this entry: Debian, Linux

Comments