kishorebhargava

Well, my ThinkPad T42 died quite suddenly. For some strange reason it started overheating and worrying temperatures of 87 C is what I was seeing at an alarming frequency. Initially, I thought it was just an issue with the fan, but apparently it wasn’t. I got the machine thoroughly cleaned and the fan serviced but it still kept getting hot! Finally, I could not take a chance with my data on the disk, and decided to extract the disk out of it and push it into an external enclosure.

Once I was sure my data was secure, I could start playing with the machine again. First thing I did was to try out Ubuntu as a live CD. Of course, after a while the ability to save stuff, specially settings was sorely missed and I decied to use a pendrive to store the settings.

While that works fine, it would be even more fun to just boot of the pendrive instead. So I rushed over to http://pendrivelinux.com and did a quick read on the options I had. While there were several methods of creating a persistent USB based distro, the one that seemed easiest was to use Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) with its built-in option for “Create a USB startup disk” in System menu. It was really quite straight-forward. Just select the option, specify the drive to be used and look carefully for the option of how much space to reserve for settings etc. And thats it. A few minutes later you’ll have a working USB with the ability to store data and settings. Trivial really. For a detailed explanation look at the following article.

I managed to use the machine in this state for quite a few days. In fact, pretty much till I bought a new notebook. Trusty old notebook became a good netbook.

A few days ago, Jyoti said she felt the need for a good netbook, so I pulled out the T42 and decided to tweak it a little further. I was curious to see what the Ubuntu Netbook Remix was all about. The following article on Maximum PC seemed to be a really good guide. All that I needed to do was add two repos to the current list and install via aptitude two little packages.

The interface that showed up was quite amazing. I don’t think I would ever use it, but for a new user or a lighter powered machine its quite a snappy and bold interface best described by this screenshot:

Ubuntu Netbook Remix

All this was done on a 2GB Transcend USB pendrive. Jyoti is now a little more serious about using this machine, so I shall be using a 4GB pendrive instead and see if I can transfer her email from the desktop and a bunch of critical documents. Should be a fun project, specially transferring the email

Before you get the idea, that I am some major Ubuntu fanboy, let me tell you that  I am not. I am currently stuck with it. Things work, its easy to manage, it looks slick but somehow at the back of my mind I am not convinced. I will run it a while longer and when I have the courage to redo my notebook, I’ll probably give Fedora another shot. If that fails, then it may just be Debian next.

Till then life goes on.

Cheers…Kishore
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