Just yesterday morning I had an article up that mentioned my latest xubuntu laptop. And just like the one that had preceded it by a few days, this machine is also gone. Not to a family member this time. Oh no, this time I killed it.
I had sent the heatsink/fan assembly to a guy to have the fan bearing replaced and generally overhauled. Worked great. However, when I reassembled it, I cut a corner and didn’t re-goop the CPU. It seemed like enough of the old tape/paste was there so I didn’t really worry about it (and yes, I know better).
This morning it started acting up. At first I thought I had a hard drive failing, so I yanked the drive to swap it with a spare. While doing that I hosed up the little IDE adapter and… well, while trying to run it from a boot CD I realized there were larger problems. Sucker just couldn’t accomplish much anymore.
Seemed like a good time to try out the new release of Damn Small Linux with my trusty old IBM 600E P2-366. Short version: It rocks. Talk about a way to revitalize an old machine. Xubuntu certainly has more features and capabilities, but it also is more resource intensive.
I opted to go down the hard drive installation route — booting from a live CD certainly works, but gets tedious and, well, I wanted to easily save my settings. Found a simple little wiki page that walked me through the install. Cake.
Now I’m just playing around with it and getting a feel for how things work. Just like the predecessors, the main use for this thing will be light surfing, IM and rdesktop/tsclient usage to remote into work. This machine has handled that load before, but now it’ll do it in a much more zippy fashion.
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January 20th, 2007 
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