On Thu, 16 Sep 2004 22:27, you wrote: > 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 beg to differ. Stock Debian 3.0 (stable) worked fine on my ThinkPad 600E. A minor effort to get sound going, but pretty much everything worked 'out of the box'. After that though there are opportunities for endless tweaking. For a quick start, Knoppix runs okay, and I also installed Mepis for a short time (thanks Jason!) before dropping back to Debian stable. I would be interested in recommendations for better laptop distros, but only because Debian stable is a bit old now. Having said that, KMail and Konqueror is all that is needed, and yes, I have infinite patience. > 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. Again, it depends. The ThinkPad 600E is has a 300MHz processor or thereabouts, and 128Mb RAM. In my opinion this is adequate (and the desktop I use is KDE), although to be honest I most often use it as a VNC terminal to my other machine. > Can anyone suggest a better distro for an old laptop? Yes, please. > 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. I found kppp was easy to configure. Here's what you have to do: 1) Discover that kppp runs only as root 2) Futz around with XAUTHORITY so you can see it on your humble user screen 3) Make it go, by detecting the modem and then entering your ISP details 4) Figure out why it won't authenticate and remove "auth" from /etc/ppp/options 5) Realise that running as root is not a good idea for the intended user, so set up sudo and give permission only for kppp Took less than 20 mins from thinking "Well, how hard can it be?" to making it happen. kppp minimises on connect, so you get blinkenlights on the panel in KDE. Of course, after this I got a bit worried because the laptop was directly connected to the internet and I had no idea how to protect it properly, hence my question. I also think that dial-on-demand is better, since the owner can just fire up Konq, or hit "Download mail" and the dialer will start. This also allows unattended operation, so cron can upload stuff to an ftp site or other such marvels. Andy > 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
