I was getting sick of Ubuntu running on my laptop. Don’t get me wrong: Ubuntu is a terrible distribution, very easy to install and to use, and integrating everything you need without big troubles. It’s a great replacement of choice for Window$.

So, why am I getting sick of it? It’s just that it is too complete. It installs by default a lot of stuff I don’t need, and never will. I am was using it on my laptop: a Acer TravelMate 800, Centrino 1.3GHz, 512Mb RAM, 40Gb HD, … I used to run Gentoo on it in the past, until the on-board ATI video card has loosely abandonned me.

When I got it back from repair, I put Ubuntu on it: everything worked out of the box. But it was so slooooow. Maybe I’m used to the speed of my new AMD64 Desktop, but I still remember the laptop was running faster and smoother under Gentoo.

So I decided to give Debian a (short) try… The installation is easy, menu driven, and short. But then begins the struggle to have all the packages I need (Xorg, Firefox 1.5, ipw2100, …). I was surprised to find only Firefox version 1.0.4 in the stable branch. I thought there was some security hole in it…

Nevermind… I leave debian on a small partition of my drive, maybe for further use, but I’m currently downloading Gentoo 2006.0 to give my laptop a second breath!!!

See you soon for feedback about the last release…