Original Cin

I decided to give the Slax “Kill Bill” Edition Live CD for a spin on my laptop the other night.

I am impressed with how far Desktop Linux has come. At precisely the point in history when an open platform is required for the future of computing, it seems that two decent choices are available: the partly proprietary but still nice Mac OS X, and Linux.

First of all, the KDE interface actually looks decent now. Not great, but decent. Much better than any shell I’ve seen from Microsoft or otherwise for Windows XP. Most of the confusion I’ve seen with various X Windows, Window Managers, and KDE settings being redundant or incompatible with one another in the past have been ironed out. The system doesn’t automatically recognize that I have a “Wide-format” screen on boot-up, so things look stretched, but fixing this is just a matter of right clicking an icon and selecting the right setting. The boot time is atrocious (I’d guess slightly more than 5 minutes), but this has nothing to with the fact that it’s Linux/KDE, and everything to do with the fact that it’s running from a CD.

One thing I’ve never managed to get right with Linux is getting onto the internet, and it seems I’m still having trouble with the Wifi card built into the laptop. I’ll post an update later.