[SWLUG] Advice please: broadband + laptop

[Kris Zani]

Chris M. Jackson wrote:
> 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.
NTL registration - when i did it - was through a windows only EXE not a 
web browser
and the info for using a web browser was not given.  a colleague rang 
them and they talked him
through setting up his linux box - the url to use etc.  Not sure if 
thats what your comment
refers to or not.
>
>> 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 ... ;-)
just stating a fact don't want a flame war. my personal laptop has run 
many distros
most of the "real" distros install lots of stuff that perhaps i don't 
need but they seem
to as everything is so well integrated.  and my laptop runs very slow.  
insert gentoo
and ok it now runs loads less but it runs what i want and is much 
faster.  I did warn
that it takes ages to initially configure, but the maintenance after 
that is pretty much
the same as every other distro except you have to keep an eye on 
software updates.