I think to finally have found what I have been searching for for quite a moment. You see, I have been using Linux for some time now. First contact was made with Debian slink somewhere in 2000 or 1999, I am not so sure. However I didn’t really start to use Linux until 2002, occasionally switching between different distributions, but always settling down, back to Debian.
Now, I had planned for a rather long time, to get myself a shiny new notebook, and after a lot of hesitations, I bought myself, while at the LinuxTag in Karlsruhe this year, a Thinkpad T42p with the UXGA+ (1600×1200) resolution.
Now, as always, or as one could imagine, my first move was to throw away the Microsoft Windows XP installation, and put Debian (Sid) on it. While many things worked with the time, nothing, and I literally mean nothing worked out of the box.
Some days later already I wasn’t to confident to get everything working. However, with all the wondrous things that had been said about Ubuntu, I thought, that I could very well give it a try. And guess what. During the installation already, Ubuntu 5.04 (called Hoary Hedgehog by the way) detected and configured correctly all of the hardware. Well, not all, because the fingerprint reader doesn’t work at this moment, but frankly I couldn’t care less about that device.
I was really happy when I installed Ubuntu. I mean, after all, it was exactly what I have been searching for, for a couple of years. It’s a system relying on free software, which runs perfectly stable and is secure. What more do I need? I can’t tell. It’s good in a productive sense, for it allows me to do just about anything. And while the packages might not be as bleeding edge as with Debian Sid, I can’t say, that it uses outdated packages either.
The possibility to use all of the apt-get tools and aptitude, is a great plus as well. Hell, if there was a root user, I think you could offer Ubuntu as a new tree in Debian, called: Consumer or something.
Stable is in my opinion at least for servers. Sid or unstable is for people who like to live on the bleeding edge (although that hasn’t been true the last few months, especially concerning Xorg), who accept all the problems that show up, with dependency problems and all. Testing is a bit a bit of a mix, at the beginning of it’s life cycle it’s technically “unstable”, and with the time it moves closer and closer to stable. While security fixes aren’t applied just as fast as with stable. There definitely is a place for such a tree in Debian. (Note that this is the way I see it, nobody has to share my opinion.)
Unfortunately Debian didn’t think about publishing it. But that isn’t important, as Ubuntu cared about. And as the flow of packages is in one direction and in the other, I do not think, that Ubuntu is for the bad of anybody.
But, as you might expect, I am drifting from the thing I wanted to write about at the beginning. When I said that about everything was working straight out of the box, well, I wasn’t telling the exact truth. However, the only things I had to install was “tpb” and “tpctl”, that is “Thinkpad buttons” and “ThinkPad Configuration Tools for Linux”. And everything worked fine.
However, I still didn’t have suspend to ram, and honestly I didn’t care for some time, this morning however, I was having a look at it, because I will need the possibility to suspend to either the hard disc or to RAM, in the near future. Well, it turned out to be more than simple. All I had to do, was sudo vim and uncomment the second line, above which it read: # Uncomment the next line to enable ACPI suspend to RAM.
I am more than astonished about the simplicity with which everything can be configured. One really has to see it for oneself to believe it. Or better, I would never have imagined that Ubuntu could be this good, at any point in time.
To sum it all up: “Ubuntu, I love it!”