One of the personal projects I’d been pursuing the past couple of days was a fresh Operating System install on my old IBM Thinkpad 390E laptop.

I am only able to accomplish this now since my machine lacked spindles.  The unit did not come packaged with the Ultrabay FX CD-ROM and floppy drives, which I’d been able to secure only very recently (I swapped my 6.0GB hard disc, which I upgraded to the 40 GB HDD I acquired cheap a couple of months back, which I thought was a dud).  So I brought out my Ubuntu 5.10 install discs I received in the mail a couple of weeks ago and proceeded to making a fresh install.

It took me about two hours to complete the installation, since the second part (setting up of the packages) took quite some time.  Understandable, for a machine of this vintage.

I had tried using the Live CD to see if everything’s fine and dandy, but I thought a hard-disc install will give me a better assessment of whether Ubuntu is up to speed in this old machine (CD-ROM access is sooo slow).

For all that effort, I was quite disappointed.  Couldn’t get the hotplug manager to work with the laptop’s USB port, and the Winmodem support was not built-in.  I could have made the necessary modifications, with a little research, a small download, and perhaps a kernel recompile (wait, is the source included in the standard install package?), but since this laptop will be serving me as a backup machine anyway (I didn’t rebuild my more powerful desktop piece-by-piece for nothing), I decided against exerting too much effort and went on to install a copy of Windows XP (Genuine.  Really.) instead.  What I love about XP and laptops is that everything just frickin’ works (of course, you’d have to be considerably learned in enduser computer security so as not to screw up your machine).

If Ubuntu could get these things working out-of-the-box, then they’d be more than worthy of their claim to be one of the Linux distros geared for the common end-user.

I love open source, but I guess we do get to encounter glitches along the path, such as these annoying compatibility issues.

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