[plug] New Laptop

[Onno Benschop]

Hi all,

It appears that I will be taking delivery of a new laptop at the end of 
next week. Apart from the joy that the "new smell" of the machine will 
bring, it also incurs some installation, seeing that the device will be 
fitted out with XP-Pro and I won't be :)

So, I'm seeking opinions. That is, you can and are encouraged to be 
opinionated about any or all of the following and the more opinionated 
you are about it, the better, seeing that I'm trying to come to grips 
with what my options are.

My current machine is a semi-desktop, that is, MicroATX, but no battery 
power, just a UPS. I currently am running Debian Testing (two months out 
of sync) and the installation was a copy from my previous Debian 
machine, that is, I booted Knoppix on both, ran scp between the old 
machine and my current machine, did some magic with lilo and was ready 
to rock. So what I'm saying is that this is an existing install that has 
been with me for some years.

I could do the same with the new laptop. However, I'm running a 2.6.5 
kernel and I know that my new laptop will need something more current to 
deal with power management, wireless and the touch-pad.

I want to support suspend to RAM and suspend to Disk, as well as 
SpeedStep and other laptop like services, like PCMCIA etc.

I could buy a Debian DVD with current Stable on it, likely cheaper than 
downloading it at 18c/Mb.

I could get the current Ubuntu and switch to that because it would 
provide me with a regular stable machine that gets updated every x months.

I could download the network install ISO, do a get-selections and 
set-selections, install the current packages from scratch and just have 
a copy of my current HDD lying around to copy config files and scripts 
across.


So, if you have opinions on the above, please share.

If you want to know what hardware we're talking about: IBM R52 - 
18586MM, that is, Pentium M 740, 1.7GHz, 512Mb, 60Gb, 1024x768.


-- 
Onno Benschop

Connected via Optus B3 at S34°45'36.5" - E139°00'08.7" (Mount Pleasant, SA)
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