On Saturday 29 October 2011 00:58:44 Imran Chaudhry wrote:
> Can anyone recommend a good Linux distro that meets the following
> requirements:
>
> - must work easily with a Huwei 3G dongle
> - Gnome 2.x
> - easy to set-up encrypted home dir
> - makes good use of a modern laptop (eg. usable webcam)
>
Debian 6.x
> I have been living with Ubunty 11.10 & Unity for the last two weeks and
> while it has eye-candy, usability and much promise, I found it hard to be
> efficient with it compared to Gnome 2 (especially where one has multiple
> terminal windows). My conclusion is that it is not suited for technical
> users. One can login with "Gnome Classic" but for some reason the menu and
> icons look rather odd and I did not have the patience to fix it. I really
> hope 12.04 maintains Gnome 2.x as 10.04. I did try Gnome 3 but discarded it
> as it was not as "obvious" to use as the alternatives.
It's still using gnome2, and knowing debian, will keep it like that until 3
has matured and become known half decent. I started disliking Ubuntu after
9.10 :-|
>
> Right now I'm using Windows 7 dual-boot. My next steps were trying Debian
> Squeeze (simple and does the job, not flashy, I have concerns of older
> drivers and software here and not getting the most out of the hardware).
> Arch Linux looks interesting also.
>
You can very easily make a customised kernel from later versions (using the
default config for ease) - But in all honesty, i've been using debian 6 for a
while now & it's supported every device I've chucked at it (3G, bluetooth,
wifi, webcams, printers etc.)
> The laptop is a Dell Latitude E6410.
>
> While I am here, has anyone done a dual-boot Windows and Linux with
> encrypted home dir or partition on both? I want to use Truecrypt for
> Windows but this would overwrite grub and I found one blog post describing
> a workaround with some hairy commands.
>
> thanks!
I have, but am using a make-shift debian inside an Ubuntu-derived Wubi using
Truecrypt drive encryption on the whole drive. On the debian desktop, I use
LUKS drive encryption, single password (or keyfile off pendrive etc) on boot &
protects all the data (at expense of IO unless CPU carries SSE2 or better).
Home dir only encryption would be better so that program data wont crap out
disk operations, like the way I've done it. But Debian does all of that.
If you're being adventurous, you could try the PC-BSD 9 (Isotope(beta)) setup.
This is a FreeBSD aimed for desktop/laptop use & offers the ability to encrypt
whole drive or specific partitions on install. The only thing this probably
wont run, is your webcam, but, some do work on it. With this too, because it's
FreeBSD and uses the same ports tree, you control what gets installed.
Hope this helps,
Ian
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