This isn’t a review so much as a gleeful and giddy note of excitement about putting Debian on my Thinkpad after I ran aground with some wireless issues in Arch. Remembering the lightning fast (comparatively, of course) performance of Debian on the K6-2, I was rather pleased with myself when I remembered I wanted to try it on the 550Mhz Celeron.

Technically, or at least from my perspective, there’s not a lot of difference between the Celeron and the K6-2. After all, a Celeron runs a little slower (according to most geeks) than a Pentium III, and it does have less memory than the K6-2 had. But start times are around 1:08, which is faster than the Sotec‘s time, and system responsiveness is better than what I remember from the Sotec.

I suppose that’s only to be expected too: The system is working at 800×600 and has more video memory. The hard drive is a 40Gb 5400rpm model, where the Sotec was suffering with 1024×768, 2Mb VRAM and a 4200rpm hard drive, if I remember right. So even if the processor has a little more speed and a little less memory, the system demands are lesser.

I did a net installation in about two hours. I immediately had one kernel update, and I’ve added ntp to solve some small clock issues. I plan on keeping this one close to stock, for as long as it lasts. Clean and simple, and nothing else.

And to be honest, there’s not much else to say — everything works just fine, which is what I expect from a Debian installation. And it moves quite fast, which is what I have learned to expect from Sarge. And after my disappointment with Debian testing, I have no plans to try the newest version — I’ll stay with the quicker, cleaner Debian, thanks. Sometimes an earlier edition is an improvement.

But it still amazes me that a machine this slow can work under a Gnome desktop. Even if it is a few versions behind current. I wouldn’t dare try this with Ubuntu, can’t find the repos for it for Crux … so I suppose I could attempt it in Arch. But … nah. I’ll leave it to Debian to handle Gnome for me. I kind of like it that way. 😉