Phine Solutions web work notes

I have a Dell Inspiron 1000 laptop which was mainly used by my wife for checking emails and some casual web surfing. I installed Xubuntu on it hoping to get the best performance out of the limited horsepower that this old laptop has. It worked OK, until I changed my wireless network security from WEP to WPA.

I found out Xubuntu doesn’t have the support for it. To better phrase it, to get WPA working in Xubuntu, I have to install some 3rd party software like wpasupplicant and make some configuration changes to get it working. Later versions of ubuntu might “just works” as described in this doc, but there seems to be issues around it.

After following the steps in one of the forum thread and failed to make it work I quit. I have to say I didn’t try very hard at it but I didn’t think spending hours on this laptop just to make wireless working made much sense, with work, business and my 2 year old I am not that kind of geek who spend days to get dialup modem working on my Linux machine any more. So I ended up putting XP (Gasp back on this machine. As a matter of fact, when XP runs with least graphic candy the performance is on par with Xubuntu running in graphic mode.

I am a person who is pretty familiar with Linux, as a matter of fact I use it every day. I like it. I would recommend it. But do I think it is ready for a average home PC user? No. It is just not simple enough to get some basic things to work. It could be a great OS to be installed in a more uniformed environment, like a lab in a university or an office environment.