My poor old HP Pavilion has sure been through a lot lately, having had its OS replaced approximately 8 times, the hard drive formatted for 5 of those. It originally shipped with Windows Millenium Edition (puke), its previous owner mercifully replacing it with Windows XP Home with Service Pack 2. I, however, found performance under Windows XP to be less than optimal, and many of the programs (i.e. games) that I wished to run on it simply wouldn’t agree with XP, or would otherwise choke at the system’s lack of video acceleration and/or DirectX 9.0 support. (Game Maker, I’m looking at you.)

So the first thing I did was stick Windows 2000 Professional on it. Performance was actually somewhat better than before, all my drivers still worked, and, most importantly, Slam Tilt Pinball worked (finally). Though as time went on, I found that Windows 2000 still didn’t suit my needs, and wondered if there was a flavor of Linux that would agree with it. So I ran down the list. Condensed version of my various attempts and findings below.

Xubuntu 8.10
I found that Xubuntu didn’t have enough memory to even install, and upon using the Alternative installer, had several read errors and eventually screwed up my boot sector (see Boot Loaders Suck).

Puppy Linux 4.2.1
Puppy actually ran from its LiveCD surprisingly well. I was highly pleased with it – until I learned that it was next to impossible to install to hard drive. (I realize that Puppy isn’t supposed to be installed to a hard drive, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.)

Damn Small Linux
DSL installed quite comfortably and even ran pretty well, but this was when I first became acquainted with the ridiculous things one needs to do to get a wireless card working in Linux. I hate you, ndiswrapper. Also, the package manager didn’t work for some reason, so I couldn’t get apps that I needed.

Debris 1.0.4
This one looked promising, until I learned that APT was connected to a very old Ubuntu database that no longer existed, and I unfortunately was unable to figure out how to set it to multiverse. Then, well, more ndiswrapper nonsense.

Fluxbuntu 7.10
Not only did APT actually work on this one, the installer acknowledged the existence of, but still didn’t know how to use, my Linksys WPC54G wireless card. More ndiswrapper nonsense later (and with heavy assistance from Malachai), I realized that ndiswrapper wasn’t even treating my wireless card as wlan0 like it was supposed to, but rather eth1, rendering it essentially useless. Default desktop settings were very pretty, though.

Tiring of all this open source stuff, I opted to just nuke the hard drive again and load up Windows 98 SE. This is an OS that I am extremely, intimately familiar with, having learned just about all of its quirks and tricks. Plus, Linksys’ driver CD supports 98, I can get mass storage drivers working very nicely, and basically I wonder why I didn’t just load Win98 on it in the first place. Since, well, that’s essentially what the darned thing came with to start with!