So I have been noticing horrible transfer speed problems on my laptop. I ran hdparm in BackTrack and got 34mb/sec in Ubuntu 2.53mb/sec. I am unable to set dma on the drive which is the real performance killer in this case. I have thus far found not solution other than compiling my own kernel, which I’m kinda annoyed about. If I wanted to be compiling kernels to get the latest features I would be using a distro that I would expect to have to do so. If I cannot find a solution I may have to move away from Ubuntu.

I install Kubuntu on my laptop today so now I am penta-booting BackTrack, Slackware, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Windows XP. I would really like to get a few more on there, but this laptop only has a 60gb hard drive and I am not in the mood to deal with the possible horror resizing partitions can cause if an error occurs. I might clean off the laptop next month and put on Solaris, and try to get Fedora working again.

As a follow up to my Ubuntu post, I spent a good number of hours playing with Ubuntu in Gnome and I have enjoyed Gnome more than I used to. I feel a big part of that is the new “shiny” features Ubuntu added. I did have a lot of trouble installing Rails though, took me about 8 times before the error telling me rails did not exist went away and when I installed mongrel fastthread blew up so I had to install the deb package to avoid a headache. I cannot say that the problem occurred because I was using Ubuntu, but since I did not compile my Ruby install I cannot say if something done during that install contributed to my problems.

Another interesting problem I had was that when I updated about 200mb in packages today my machine suddenly started taking a crap on me. I do not get the shiny boot screen for Ubuntu and I am not entirely sure why, but I also don’t even get text on my screen. This means if something goes wrong I cannot know what caused it. Basically it went like this, the machine was booting (known by looking at the HD light) and then stopped, I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL and then it took a few seconds and booted into X. Once I have logged in I am missing my nice shortcuts to other partitions and I even had trouble mounting them. After one attempt mounting them I said screw it and reinstalled Ubuntu.

With all of that said I am at somewhat of a fork in the road. I would really like to install 7 or 8 distros on this laptop so that I can try some of the things I learn at conferences, but at the same time, I would really like to use just one operating system on the machine. I love my Slackware, and I would like to keep Backtrack on incase I ever need it, but I feel as my main laptop distro I will be using Ubuntu for the simple fact that it works right out of the box for me, if I ever need to reinstall on the road I can and know that I don’t have to download anything to get wireless working or hassle with anything to get standby working.

I can buy a 1gb memory stick for this laptop for $129 from the Dell website, which isn’t horrible, but at the same time it is $129 for 1gb of RAM. If I install another stick, I have to remove one 256 stick giving me roughly 1.2gb of RAM. That memory could then be used for VMWare server, which would allow me to run as many distros as I wanted. The one downside is that I have received information from very good sources BackTrack should always be run from a LiveCD or direct boot, and should not be used from a VM.

I’ll end this post now that I feel I am jumping into too many things, but before I do I have decided to backup the things that I need to backup and I setup my laptop right. I will be removing Kubuntu and Slackware, installing Ubuntu on the Slackware partition, deleting the old Ubuntu and Kubuntu partitions and joining them to make one ext3 shared partition. I have to have Windows XP and I have to have BackTrack to complete my labs and my exam for OSCP.

Funny I went from Penta-booting to Triple-Booting in one day and for no good reason.