Laptops

I got a new laptop at work the other day. It is a Lenovo X230 which replaces the best laptop I ever had, the Lenovo X200. I carried the X200 around wherever I went for three years, and in that time I had to replace the battery once. Which is really simple: you buy a new one, take the old one out (no screws) and put the new one in. Oh, I replaced the old hard disk with an SDD one too. That involved taking one (1) screw out, pull the old one out and push the new one in.

Wow. I am back in Mac land, which I left in 1996 when I started my career at IBM and turned into a PC drone. Now, after four days of pure Mac joy, it feels like I am never going back.

This also goes to show what a cool company Valtech is. I mentioned this to Jon who got really jealous. Apparently the Thoughtworkers get company issued Dells and all Mac stuff is paid for by themselves.

Some time ago I got a new IBM X40. It is now running Ubuntu Hoary and I must say that it is really an excellent piece of hardware. Everything but the SD card reader works out of the box, which of course also goes to show what a great distro Ubuntu is. Get’em both.

My old 3Com Prism54 card for some reason did not work anymore on Linux. I finally gave in a bought a new MadWifi one which worked out of the box. Sweet!

After a lot of work my shiny new IBM R40e is up and running with almost working ACPI, internal network adapter and a 3Com 54g wireless PCMCIA card, all on Gentoo Linux.

A Mini HOWTO:

• Get an old PCMCIA card for the installation as the internal network adapter is not supported by the Live-CD
• I choose the Gentoo Stable kernel which is working great
• Do not enable PCMCIA in the kernel, emerge the pcmcia-cs package instead for continued setting up of the system.
• Get the network card driver from Broadcom, the card is a BCM-5700. Compile it and put it in the /lib/modules/*kernel-version*/kernel/driver/net/ folder. Run update-modules and modprobe bcm-5700 Add it to /etc/modules.autoload/kernel-2.4 if needed
• Get the ISL driver for the 3Com card. Follow the instructions closely, but patch the gs-sources kernel instead. I removed the pcmcia-cs package before compiling the kernel as it provides its own cardbus implementation. Supposedly only the card drivers can be compiled, but I didn’t try that.
• Emerge the wireless-tools package. iwconfig is your friend.
• ACPI is somewhat unstable, the battery information comes and goes in a undetermistic way.
• The modem is supported by the HSF driver but that in turn does not support preemptible kernels. Choose whatever you want

I’ll probably update this as I learn more. This is posted over wireless by the way :)

I got myself a new laptop the other day, a IBM T40e. It has a pretty good price performance with a 2.2 GHz Pentium 4M. While researching the laptop market it occured to me that most resellers still has not understoiod the difference between Centrino, Pentium 4M and Pentium 4. The vendor I choose happily listed the T40e as a P4 even though it in fact is a P4M.

As a Gentoo fanatic I put the Live CD in an booted - no network. The Broadcom 5700 adapter was not supported out of the box, so after trying I few innovative ideas like creating a custom LiveCD, I suddenly realized that I could use my old Xircom card in the PCMCIA bus. Sometime the easy solutions are really hard to find, and sometimes I’m just a dork for not seeing them. This time it was the latter.