So, there I was in Salt Lake City, sick as a dog, with my faithful IBM T40 ThinkPad. This system uses a 1.5 GHz Pentium M processor with 1 MB of L2 cache, and a 400 MHz FSB (Front Side Bus). It has 512 MB of DDR SDRAM memory, and a built-in ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 AGP 4x with 32 MB of VRAM for graphics.

The T40s came from the factory with one of three different WiFi cards in a miniPCI slot; mine came equipped with an Intel PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI Adapter. It also has a built-in 10/100 Ethernet port. In my case, I also use a NetGear RangeMax WPN511 WiFi card because of its faster -- 802.11g -- performance and that the card itself has better range than any Centrino-based laptop I've ever used

On this system, I had zero -- nada -- trouble installing the new distribution. Despite what you may read elsewhere about how hard installing Linux is, installing a modern Linux, like MEPIS, which is based on Ubuntu, is a snap on 95 out of 100 systems. I don't even recall the last time I had to do anything more complicated than hitting the enter button when installing Linux. That's a good thing, because I don't think I could have done much more than that on this particular go-around.

SimplyMEPIS 6.5 is built on the 2.6.17 Linux kernel, based on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Service), aka "Dapper Drake," by the way. Until version 6.0, MEPIS had been built on Debian, but MEPIS designer Warren Woodford found that Debian Stable was too far behind the curve, and Debian Testing/Unstable was advancing too quickly and breaking too often, so he switched to Ubuntu.

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