Josh Saddler

I'm still busy setting up my Thinkpad R61i. In many ways, this thing is more of a pain than the ancient Toshiba it replaces. That's part coincidence, and part "I-really-want-to-do-this-right" and part "I-really-want-maximum-power-save-and-avoid-risking-hardware-damage".

One of the few bits of hardware that didn't take hours of setup was the fingerprint reader. I lucked out and got a working UPEK TouchStrip, vendor ID 0483:2016. It works for console logins and su to root. fprint is awesome!

I'm using stable amd64 mostly, except where I need the latest ~arch packages for hardware functionality. I used a stage3 tarball from Daniel. So nice to have an up-to-date stage.

The capacious-yet-quiet hard disk came preloaded with Vista Home Premium. Ugh. I used a Sidux LiveCD to shrink it and shove it off to a corner. Why did I use Sidux? Because they seemed to be the only distro whose LiveCD offered a 2.6.24 kernel, which meant....wireless installation! Wrong. Lies. They use .23, no iwl3945 drivers anywhere. I had to get out my ridiculously short ethernet cable. Bother.

On the Gentoo side, I ended up going with ext3 for / and ext2 for /boot. This is most unlike me, as I'm normally a ReiserFS man. I figure 1) it's possible that if something does go wrong, it may be easier to recover with ext3. 2) I can try out ext4 later. 3) Fewer packages to emerge; e2fprogs is already part of the system set. As far as usage goes ... ext3 is perceptibly slower for certain operations, but it also feels much faster when mounting.

The whole configuration process is still ongoing, with a few major problems:

1. Masked and unstable drivers for X. Still only xorg-x11 installed; no Xfce4 yet. At least I have working hardware acceleration with the X3100 chip, using xorg-server 1.4 and mesa 7.0.2.

2. Wireless. Day and a half to get it mostly working. At boot, it seems to associate with my WPA access point, but then goes inactive immediately. Unfortunately, it seems to take the service with it, so things like netmount and ntp-client don't start. Now, the device is actually associated and has retrieved its IP address. But it's an unresolved headache as to why it does all this but still doesn't consider the service "started". This is with kernel 2.6.24, in-kernel iwl3945 modules, as well as crypto modules. Once Xfce is running, I plan to undo most of my networking config files and just use NetworkManager or some other tool to do everything. I hate having to manually edit conf.d/net just to change from my home network to public access points in libraries, coffee shops, etc.

3. uvesafb. Day and a half to figure out. Apparently I needed a weird/unintuitive setting or two in my kernel config. Works now at native resolution, 1280x800.

4. hdaps. Apparently my harddrive isn't supported? It's possible the folks at IBM refurbished the laptop with a non-stock drive.

5. thinkpad_acpi. Not all buttons are working yet, specifically screen brightness. That's despite following the basic instructions at ThinkWiki on kernel module parameters. I haven't really delved into it yet, though. At least the thinklight works.

6. Touchpad & trackpoint. I figured out just an hour ago why the trackpoint wasn't working. Though the protocol was set to "IMPS/2", I had to change the driver to "mouse". So now both work in X. Will post config later. My hope is that the middle button works properly once I get Xfce and Firefox installed.

That's it for now. I haven't done much else besides get the bare necessities working for the console environment.

My goals are as follows, in no particular order:

1. Complete desktop installation & configuration.
2. Setup low-latency/realtime system and applications for music recording and editing.
3. Configure system to draw as little power as possible, regardless of activity. I really want at least 3 hours out of my existing battery, even though I'll also be buying an UltraBay battery.
- setup laptop mode for just about everything, including hard drive, CPU, wifi card, soundcard, bluetooth, screen, optical drive, reduce interrupts, etc. I'm really nervous about hard drive settings in particular, as we all know what happens to it under too-frequent spindowns.
4. Figure out how to turn off the darned green LED light by the optical drive. It's killing me.
5. Did I mention power efficiency?
6. Get the rest of thinkpad_acpi and all the nifty hotkeys working. I want hotkeys that work, unlike my Toshiba's nonworking keys.
7. Setup Gentoo development environment, GPG stuff, etc.
8. ???
9. Profit.

I'll post more in the coming days, and (if I still have the strength) I'll write up some installation notes and configuration information, probably in my devspace or on ThinkWiki. Not much info out there on the R61 series.

I've got the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart. In spite of the rain that's deluging the county. Why? Because my Thinkpad R61i arrived today.

I lucked out in three critical ways:

1) Shipping condition. Not a scratch; it's like it was never used.
2) Trackpad. I booted the x86 2007.0 LiveCD, and it seems to think that it's a real Synaptics device. I mean, scrolling on the pad was enabled and everything. Though it did decide that the top middle button, when pressed, should be an M key.
3) Working fingerprint reader. While lsusb isn't present on the LiveCD, some poking around /proc/bus/usb/devices showed a vendor ID of 0483:2016, which is supported by fprint, and presumably by thinkfinger as well.

I only had time to boot it up and quickly check the hardware specs before heading off to work. Will post more on it later, and I think I'll write up some installation notes and stick 'em in my devspace too.

Happiness is an awesome laptop. This thing is so quiet. Lightweight, too. And it seems to have hardware that actually works in Linux. Sure, the keyboard layout isn't satisfactory, but I can probably work around that with keybinding. It's otherwise a dream machine. Well, mine anyway.

I want to take it to SCALE in a couple of weeks, but now I'm worried about it being stolen. Figures. I'll at least bring along my ancient crappy Toshiba laptop as a booth demo machine. That worked last year.

I finally picked out an acceptable laptop and managed to win it on eBay, after trying unsuccessfully for several days, losing out at the last hour. I also spent many hours hunting through online shops; I almost went through Lenovo.com's store, but customers are reporting terrible experiences with 'em, so I went with eBay instead. No word on shipping; I assume it'll go out via priority USPS tomorrow.

I snapped up a new Thinkpad R61i for just over $600, counting shipping. That's $200 more than I originally planned to pay, back when I was still looking for the ultimate low-end laptop, like a $399 Acer Aspire or Everex StepNote.

On paper, the Thinkpad should be fully supported in Linux, though I won't know about the integrated fingerprint reader until it arrives. Lenovo recently decided to use a slightly different UPEK product that seems to be missing crypto logic, so there's no support for those kinds of readers whatsoever. They won't work with binary drivers (like bioapi), nor with thinkfinger or fprint. I'm keeping my fingers crossed! (Pun intended.)

The specs:
CPU: C2D T5250 1.5ghz (Yes, I'm aware that this may make me somewhat of a traitor to my fellow AMD enthusiasts)
GPU & screen: Intel X3100, 15.4" widescreen 1280x800
RAM: 2GB
HDD: 120GB
Networking: Intel gigabit LAN & 3945ABG wireless

For the first time ever, I'm actually up in the air about whether or not to install 32-bit or 64-bit Gentoo on the thing. I've been doing enough reading over at ThinkWiki and other places to consider a 32-bit installation. Since there's only 2GB of RAM in the machine, I don't have any particular hardware reasons to go 64-bit. And some of the audio applications I intend to run on it aren't keyworded amd64, or just plain don't work on 64-bit CPUs. It's been giving me and my desktop headaches.

I think one of the first upgrades I'll be making will be to order an Ultrabay battery, as well as check the included battery. I need something with long life at a reasonable cost. I'll probably have to shop at Lenovo's store to get the battery, so I guess "reasonable cost" is right out. Which means that, according to resellerratings.com, if it ever arrives, it'll be in a few months. Joy.

But hey, that can't diminish my enthusiasm for actually snagging a (great?) laptop at a great price. Happy belated Christmas to me!

Once the laptop arrives, I'll see about getting a USB-to-MIDI cable so I can put the thing to use as a digital audio workstation. So much fun ahead!

I definitely want a ThinkPad. Since my previous entry, I've done some serious scouting around for one. I want one. I do.

I'm really attracted to the R61 series (R61, R61i, R61e), but I've just uncovered some scary problems with the recent models:

1. Wireless issues: seems iwlwifi doesn't work for some users, and/or they use ndiswrapper.
2. Fingerprint issues: the R61 series will likely come with a fingerprint scanner that is completely inoperable in Linux. There's an open bug for supporting it in fprint (dsd's awesome project; go check it out), but I'm not hopeful. The manufacturer is entirely uncooperative. Why, oh why did Lenovo switch to them?!?
3. Touchpad issues: seems that some later-model 61s are shipping with an ALPS pad, rather than the tried-and-true Synaptics. Users are having to resort to all kinds of hackery to get the useful features out of their pad.

So, though I still want a ThinkPad, I'm now having second thoughts about an R61. I want some kind of ThinkPad, though. Basically, it needs to have all its hardware functional purely with open-source drivers, or something resembling open-source. This is going to be a Gentoo development laptop, so said drivers should be in Portage.

Requirements:

1. Physical dimensions: minimum 15.4" screen; weight no more than 6.5 pounds, ~5 pounds preferred.
2. Working wireless: open-source drivers (Intel desired; Atheros is close enough). Absolutely no ndiswrapper!
3. Intel X3100 graphics.
4. Working Synaptics trackpad. I want one that can do scrolling and all the other nifty tricks it's famed for.
5. Working ACPI. This means the buttons and Fn combinations work, as well as the fan (which had better be cool & quiet).
(Possibly optional)
6. Working fingerprint scanner. Really. One that works. Now that I know some ThinkPads have 'em, I want one. Seems like an awesome feature!

So . . . since I've only studied the R61 series, what other ThinkPads are worth investigating?

Back again. Started to really get back to work on Gentoo, with more documentation commits, bugfixes, etc.

Also started using some new gtk+ applications: beandog added my ebuild for brasero-0.7.0 to Portage, and I got drac to keyword asunder-1.0. I've been meaning to ditch k3b for awhile now, so I finally unmerged it, and started cutting down on the number of dependencies. I still need qt for Rosegarden and Hydrogen, bah! In the meantime, I now have a pair of decent disc writing & ripping tools for my CD collection. Still a couple of bugs, though -- brasero doesn't seem to like writing single-layer DVDs (though dual-layer works fine), and asunder's mp3 encoding flat-out doesn't work, at least so far on amd64. Still doing further testing on x86. Also, it's rather slower than most other tools out there. At least FLAC, wav, and Ogg work, though I already have those through sound-juicer. Now that I've got mp3 encoding working in sound-juicer, I'll use it until I can figure out asunder. I'm working actively with upstream to get this worked out; major props to Andrew for being so responsive.

On the laptop front, I've found some possibilities. The hard cost limit is still under $600, but I've found several intriguing models in the $380 to $500 range. Originally, I was set on finding a used Everex StepNote of some kind and installing the developer edition of Zonbu on it, then using that stepping stone to turn it into my usual Gentoo environment. Don't get me wrong; the price on the Zonbu notebook ain't too bad, but for almost $500, I think I could do better. There are still used/refurbished StepNotes out there for only $400. There's also an Acer model or two at that price range, but they're usually out of stock at online merchants, as well as being only 14.1".

Side note: former Gentoo developer plasmaroo (Tim Yamin) works for Zonbu, and has been doing much to get that tricky VIA hardware working & other things, so congrats to him. Perhaps he's one of the reasons why Zonbu went with Gentoo as their base OS?

I've also found a couple of interesting cheap dual-core Gateway laptops such as the ML6720, though no real information can be found on their Linux compatibility.

I've been kind of hoping that my new laptop would be dual-core, but that's just asking for reduced battery life. It'd make compiling faster, but at the cost of power, heat, and definitely price. If I stay closer to $400 I won't need to worry about future-proofing with dual-core; I'd just buy a new laptop at a similar price point sometime in the future. Single-core desktop usage & development ain't that bad on a laptop, right?

Just tonight I found some extremely attractive Lenovo notebooks. Intel X3100 graphics and boast up to 4.5 hours battery life. Now, this last bit is flat-out amazing. I was all gung-ho on getting a cheap VIA-based notebook like this one because of the 3-hour battery life, and it is an alternative to Intel. Hey, I have an AMD workstation. But the Lenovos I'm looking at . . . sure, they're more than $400. And some of them are only Celeron chips (historically underpowered).

But man oh man . . . I found some new & used Thinkpad 61-series models that look good, as well as some Lenovo 3000 N models. And they're 15.4" widescreens. Light. Acceptably thin. They even have CD/DVD drives, which is almost optional for me. One's even dual-core.

So now I have to figure out how much money I really want to spend -- $400 to $600 is really a huge price gap; there are far too many features and choices available for any given manufacturer.

What's really starting to sway me over to Lenovo, despite my earlier post, is whether or not the integrated wifi, pointer, and fingerprint reader are in solid working condition. Specifically for the R/T/X/61 & 3000 N series. And whether the rest of ACPI, hotkeys, power management, HDAPS, and disc drives work correctly. And that I can get CPU/HDD temperatures, remaining battery life, and processor speed reported in a graphical utility. Apparently lm_sensors shouldn't be used on Thinkpads, so I wonder what else would report that info. On the fingerprint reader front, dsd is working on some kinda fingerprint software. Will have to check. Will also have to find some recommended spindown & sleep settings for Thinkpad hard disks.

For features, Thinkpads are looking better and better. It's true, they do look like refugees from 1985. Ugly as sin. Ugly as a dead cow in clown shoes. Splashed with hideous bits of color here and there. But still . . . they're starting to become attractive.

So, it's a new year. With new possibilities. Like laptops. Especially laptops. Now I just have to get my wife to sign off on one in time for SCALE . . .