Happiness is a warm ThinkPad.

So I got a ThinkPad yesterday. Nothing fancy, it is the entry-level, cheapest thing in the lineup, one that comes without an operating system. (At the shop I salivated a lot over the X41 Tablet, but that is, of course, waaay beyond what I can afford. Sigh.)

I wanted to bless the baby with some Debian GNU/Linux holy water. The only installation source I had was a Sarge DVD that came with PCQuest Magazine in December 2004. I am away from Debian for the past few years after my old desktop machine conked out and so was expecting to spend a whole night getting stuff to work. (That, after keeping myself awake through Monday night. And all Saturday night at Fireflies, with silent snoring intervals.)

To my surprise, everything has worked without hassle, so far. It booted, X worked, sound worked, and all that without much of an effort. No idea about wireless since I don't have a network. There is a usable yet somewhat oldish-looking desktop. That's okay, I am not a fan of the latest and greatest and I don't give much of a hoot about the desktop as long as things get done - as in, say, as long as Emacs works fine.

But I still haven't got over the shock of not having edited a single configuration file yet.

Big news, the world has changed a lot since 2002.