Turning little Win-8.1-laptop to Linux-laptop.
Some relevant (drivers etc) technical data:
Resolution - 1366x768,
CPU - Celeron N2840 2,16 ghz 64bit Silvermont,
Graphics - Intel HD,
Sound - Intel + realtek,
Ethernet - Realtek RTL8101E/RTL8102E,
Wifi - Qualcomm Atheros QCA9565/AR9565,
Touchpad - Elan.
Most of info came from lspci, lsusb, lscpu and inxi.
Original state.
I bought this little thing (11.6") in December 2014.
It had 'Windows 8.1 with Bing' OEM x86_64 installed (original dvd: IR3_CCONA_X64FREO_EN-US_DV9.iso), AND totally bloated with Lenovo crapware, including infamous Lenovo superfish-spyware (this link, or other thousands).
After struggling a bit with remove-all-shit, I tried - as a passtime - to install Slackware 14.1 for dual-boot. With partial success only - X refused to start (might have been problem of oldish kernel).
Fortunately, in process, I messed up EFI and Windows didn't start anymore - so I had an excuse to reinstall vanilla win8.1 (registration is automatic, in bios).
Tuned it, played around, and hated whole thing. You can't make bread out of shit, even with helpful addons. Also, whole system tended to be quite sluggish (not a surprise really, with Celeron N2840).
So, after a long while (it laying around mostly unused) I decided to wipe whole disk and install Linux.
The machine has efi+secure boot, but - BOTH can be disabled. And that makes installing Linux markedly easier.
My initial goals were something like:
- fast and lean distro; with little bloat (no fullblown desktop environment);
- reasonably stable;
- with all my favourite software available;
- without let-us-be-new-Windows like crap - from systemd to gnome shell.
Which made me pick Crux (crux.nu and do local search to find my three previous Crux-posts). But - because I also had a waiting-list of 'I should try this one', then I decided to try first those of the list (Antix 15, Funtoo, Alpine 3.2.3).
To action:
1. Antix 15, 64 killah p.
A distro based on Debian 8 Jessie, but with systemd carefully removed. Full iso comes with four window managers which are swappable on fly, in X. It includes control center and various other scripts. Means - sounds interesting.
Antix' install is from the live session (I think I dd-d the usb-stick...).
username/passwd - demo/demo.
I deleted all Lenovo partitions, made swap, root and home partitions: traditional MBR, as I don't see why I should use GPT with one 500GB disk. And mind - after several installs and different bootloaders it's wise to use fdisk, gdisk, mkfs and such - for wiping disk really clean.
With little helpful trick - reading ability - the installation is a cakewalk, nothing need to be explained here.
Rebooted and logged to JWM.
Checked other WMs ... didn't like default confs and looks, as it always happens with me... So, here come short bits as 'How to tune debian distro, and also brake it':
... Synaptics, enabled more repos. Installed xapian-index (gives a search-window on toolbar);
... rebuilt JWMs menu and launchbar, reordered everything (Joe's site is very helpful as of howto);
... ~/.jwm/theme - seems to have a syntax error: not 'dejavu sans 10', but 'dejavu sans-10'. Otherways it doesn't react to any size change.
There were several annoyances from the beginning:
- Cursor jumping around when typing (very &^%&^#@$%!).
- medit and geany started occasionally new window instances - as opposed to keeping things in tabs...
- when changing window managers various things happened, including some apps closing, some forgetting tabs... But here I doubt very much if it's possible at all to smoothly integrate very different WMs and (different) default apps ...
- few usual app-related-bugs every distro tends to have: Here - clipit didn't start and xmahhjong crashed whole JWM.
So I started to remove Antix goodies, first other WMs and then all antix-scripts and antix-libs.
Re-tuned confs and shit... and, of course, ended up with one-or-two hidden, not-so-easily-findable leftover-quirks ...
My curiosity about Antix satisfied and not willing to spend more time with detective-work I formatted the whole thing.
Some general moral here: If not having unlimited time - do not full-rebuild prebuilt distro.
Ah, well... but it WAS interesting when it lasted. :)
As long you do not have touchscreen and -pad; and do not change 'desktops' on fly - Antix is recommended. It's nice, lean piece of work.
It also ended up as my 6-year old son desktop system. Who seems to be entirely OK with it.
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