Holidays in Linux Land

I've been on a bit of a holiday, visiting other Linuxes. I've been using MEPIS for some time, and it was beginning to seem a little dull and humdrum. It's blue, and I like blue; but it's not the cheerful blue of summer skies, but the sensible, dull blue of NHS hospital corridors and old dusty schoolrooms. I wanted something shiny and fresh.

First I visited Mandriva. You can't get more cheery than that; it's orange and flowery. It's also elegant and simple, and doesn't take up your time with software you'll never use but feel you ought to try just to find out what it does. I could be happy here, I thought – until I tried to connect to my university's Microsoft VPN. There was no provision for that. Other VPNs, by all means, but why would anyone running Linux want to talk to people running Windows?

I wandered away from the sunshine of Mandriva. Where next? I thought. I know, I'll try Kubuntu. Very similar to MEPIS, but with more cheery blues and shinier icons. And it has that fancy new networkmanager that everyone's using these days. I booted up the live CD. It detected my wifi network immediately, asked me for the password, then sat there connecting... and connecting... and connecting... It's pretty little cogwheel went round and round, but it could never get beyond 28%. Seems my Ralink wifi card, which was sooo Linux-compatible when I bought it, is terribly unfashionable these days.

Where now, then? I thought I'd try something completely different, and headed for that Lichtenstein of Linux, Puppy. It is sooo small! Tiny! The whole OS and all its software fits into 64Mb of RAM. Consequently, it's blindingly fast. But... not pretty. Still, a good find, since it loads in no time and will make a great rescue disc for fixing hard drives and connecting to the internet looking for answers when the main OS is broken.

But where were all those people going? They seemed to be heading in the direction of PCLinuxOS. And when I got there, I was impressed. It was very blue. And very shiny. In fact, it looked so much like Windows XP, I began to feel a little nostalgic for the old days. Simply revolutionary, it said. Not, however, revolutionary enough to connect to a Microsoft VPN.

I was running out of appealing places to go, now. Especially as, when I started researching on the net, I found that distros seem to mostly fall into two catagories – those that support MS VPNs but not my wifi card, and those that support my wifi card but not MS VPNs. But... I found some info on how to get Kubuntu to talk to my wifi card – first step, remove networkmanager. Of course, this wasn't in the info on the CD, and I couldn't access the net from Kubuntu to find it.

Still, got there in the end. Kubuntu was talking to the wifi network, and all I had to do was update the repositories and install pptpconfig. Oh, and all those pesky media codecs so I can play mp3s and DVDs. But VPN first. I download pptpconfig; all the dependencies follow. I set up the connection. I click the start button. It starts to connect... then pauses... and pauses... and pauses. It doesn't work! It worked in MEPIS. It worked in Ubuntu the last time I tried it. Why doesn't it work?

Finally, a little reluctantly, I turn and head back to MEPIS. I reinstall it. It detects my wifi card and starts working straight away. I install pptpconfig; it connects to my university VPN first time. Everything works as it should. OK, it's a bit dull; maybe I could get some new wallpaper, and hang a few shiny icons about the place. But you know where you are with MEPIS. It's home.