Are you sure that you've got the patience for setting up Debian on a laptop? Especially for someone else. There's better distros for laptops and I speak from experience given that Debian is what I run on my laptop. If I wasn't such a damn geek I'd never have got it working properly.
I understand the logic though... slow laptop so you might as well build a tailor made system. But as soon as you install stable with gnome I think you'll still find it doggedly slow. Can anyone suggest a better distro for an old laptop? Also, kppp is a bitch to configure and use as a normal user and it was enough to drive me away from KDE altogether. I use pon and poff with the modemlights applet under gnome. Very tidy. Michael. On Wed, 2004-09-15 at 10:08, Andrew Errington wrote: > Hi, > > I am proposing to set up a Debian based laptop for a friend. All they need > is email and web from a dial-up ISP, so a fairly low-spec PC with KDE from > Debian stable is adequate. > > I have set up kppp on my laptop, which is similar to one I will get. To > make it work I had to install 'sudo', so that an ordinary user can run kppp > as root, and I had to remove 'auth' from /etc/ppp/options > > Anyway, that works fine, and kppp will dial up when I press a button, and > disconnect when I press another button. I think I would prefer > dial-on-demand though, so I am going to try the instructions here: > > http://www.davidpashley.com/tutorials/wvdial-pppd-dod.html > > At home I am on cable, and I have a router box that basically acts as my > firewall. I have no 'protection' on any of the machines on my home > network, and I rely on the router for this. > > What should I do to get the appropriate level of protection when I connect > directly to the internet with a modem? My friend will not need to run any > servers (e.g. ftp or web), but I would like them to have an ssh server so I > can get in and administer the box. > > Thanks for any advice, > > Andy
