Now I have a new portable work computer (Lenovo X260) so there is no longer
need to keep old software setup on my own Lenovo X61s laptop. It's technically
not in a perfect state but still less or more works.
Because most likely there will be no progress on the Ubuntu Touch (I my opinion
there is no chance that the most annoying bugs - like random restarts of the
Unity and failures of native applications when external screen is connected -
will be fixed) it makes sense to use other travel device instead of the Aquaris
M10 tablet. Thus I decided to try to use the old X61s.
Some changes on the poor old laptop have been done:
* the large but classical HDD was replaced by OCZ's SSD (originally got for use
in my SGI O2 but never used as I still didn't manage to get an adapter),
* the OS was obviously freshly installed (that wasn't a big loss as there was a
pretty basic system from the time of the last reinstall).
I have decided to get an Ubuntu 16.04 (I don't use non-LTS versions). Ihe
installation was pretty fast and without issues. There is even (a working) GNU
Octave GUI. I do prefer a CLI version (I edit scripts in the Vim and run them
in a terminal) but the GUI is useful when I have to present stuff for others.
And of course it's a 4.x version which is also nice (I'm too lazy to compile
it).
Other works as expected (Vim/Gvim, LaTeX, compilers,...). The system even isn't
noticeably slower than the 12.04 which was previously installed.
The speed of the computer is actually not an issue: I do not own anything
faster or even comparable (my work machine - the X260 - is of course faster),
even the iMac G5 is slower. It has a Core2Duo processor (the oldest possible
one, I guess) at 1.6 GHz and 4 GB of RAM and now a 128 GB SDD drive. That's
really not bad.
Of course, the modern Linux desktop software mostly don't include examples of
code optimized for speed nor effectivity but still the global speed is
comparable with the SGI's desktop (of course, when it comes to real computing,
the X61s is much faster).
There is one paradox: only recently I do accepted the existence of the Ubuntu's
Unity and learned how to use it without too much anger - and then the Ubuntu
decided to drop this environment. :-( I don't like the Unity but I like it much more than the KDE or even the GNOME Shell.
So I plan to use this computer for my (infrequent) traveling. Hopefully it
will survive for some time...
