[SWLUG] Advice please: broadband + laptop

[Chris M. Jackson]

On 5/15/06, Kris Zani <kriszani at iscavision.com> wrote:
> NTL works great - just use the ethernet cable and your laughing.  some
...
> i don't turn it off very often. - and i think you will need a windows
> box to bind the cable modem's mac address to ntl or ring them and have
> them talk you through the manual undocumented method.
In most cases, as long as you have a browser that supports JavaScript
(annoyingly, the use of JavaScript is purely cosmetic - it refreshes a
page *just* before you can actually use the connection, and serves
only to change some text on a page.

> word of advice, with laptops general all purpose distros can be pretty
> slow, so you will find mandriva, suse, ubuntu and fedora to be
> much much slower than windows xp.  a custom minimal kernel and so on can
> help but my gentoo laptop rocks.  takes ages to setup
> initially as compiling things like gnome take an age but i think its
> worth it.
This seems a little spurious, since with Gentoo you end up with
binaries built for your x86, optimised with -O2, as opposed to real
distributions, where you get binaries built for your x86 for you, also
(probably) optimised with -O2.  So, if you've got a week to waste
compiling and configuring software ... ;-)

-- 
Chris Jackson
Now with enhanced time-wasting capabilities
Non-Terminal Boredom: http://www.xpns.co.uk/life/