So I’ve been using Slackware for about a week now… As I approach the end of week two I have to admit that I’m not all that satisfied with progress on this experiment.
Slackware is definately faster than Ubuntu was. Though the same could be said for Fedora 10. I now know that to make the webcam work I just need to compile the latest kernel module for uvcvideo. VirtualBox is the same with each distro and that guarentees that I can get all of my work done. I have determined that the improvement in performance from my wireless card comes from using a 32-bit OS rather than 64-bit, and so that makes the choice of distro less relevent provided I stick to 32-bit. So… what now?
Well… as it happens I was running some updates on my desktop computer, which runs LinuxMint and I noticed that there is an update for the xorg-video-intel package. I read through the changelog and happened to notice that this included two patches that combat and fix the blank-screen-hard-crash issue that is associated with Intel G45 or x4500 graphics cards. As far as I can tell one is the one that happens at boot (which has happened a few times with Slackware and did happen a lot with Ubuntu) and the other is during normal use, which is the trouble I was having in Fedora that prevented me from using Compiz.
I don’t have a problem making the decision of whether or not to wipe what I’ve built so far using Slackware because that’s what this week is about, and I’ve learnt a bit about my system in the last week with the work I’ve done. However, what I don’t want to do on a whim is install Ubuntu or LinuxMint straight away because I know that Ubuntu isn’t quite as responsive as some other distros and I probably wont have the system I want.
I’m going to consider CrunchBang… and I’m also going to siphon through some ArchLinux package updates and see if they’re up to speed on these new patches…. 
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Distro-hopping, Fedora, Hardware, Linux, Linux Distributions, Slackware, Ubuntu
