Laptop running Xubuntu 11.10 now

While dealing with things in Wisconsin earlier this month, Xubuntu 10.04 annoyed me for the last time. I wound up having to boot into Windows to get some things done since 10.04 just plain quit doing a thing or two I needed. That was, of course, the last straw. There was simply NO more reason to keep 10.04 around.

So a couple weeks ago I downloaded Xubuntu 11.10 and tried it as a LiveCD on andalusian. I still had to install the 32-bit compatibility libraries, but they worked - and the laptop's wireless hardware was recognized, which I consider a Big Win over needing to recompile the wireless driver at each kernel update as I did with 10.04. Another win was that once the wireless was set up, after the actual install to hard drive, the settings were retained. Maybe this was the case before, but not having hardware recognized by default meant I didn't encounter it. I left things sit for a while (been rather busy with various other things of late...) and only recently ran some updates. Another win: Upon rebooting I did not need to manually restart the local wireless connection as I did before.

I'd heard there were some issues with 11.10, but so far I've not run into them. I am considering updating belgian to 11.10 as well. While it is an improvement, I still hope to run PCLinuxOS. The 64 bit version of that is still in testing (not even beta yet, let alone Release Candidate...) though if 11.10 had given me trouble I was considering going to 32-bit PCLOS with the PAE kernel - a hack to let 32-bit software use 64-bit memory space after a fashion. Why PCLOS? Because after using PCLOS for a few years, *buntu, even with the improvements, still feels 'almost' to me.

LCD/LED

Way back in the mists of time... er, alright, it was probably September 30 jmaynard & I went to Manktao to check out Five Guys and I figured I'd at least look at LCD monitors and perhaps see what I liked best and then order from NewEgg. We looked at two or three places and, to my surprise, the best deal was actually at Best Buy. I had been pondering a big 27-inch monitor but the resolution wasn't any better at that size so it'd just be bigger pixels. The 23-inch monitors seemed reasonably priced and comparing a few, the AOC looked the best.

I hesitated and so we went and had lunch and I thought about it some. Checking NewEgg the prices were about the same with the shipping and there was the matter of having it right away. So we went back & I (eventually... oy, it took forever to get a clerk's attention) bought it. So now I'm not using the old 1024x768 LCD but a nice new 1920x1080 LED backlit 23-inch on belgian. I still haven't truly seen about repairing the 19-inch LCD. If I can repair it I then need to decide if I want to use that for percheron or maybe even use it as a second monitor on belgian.

Running too cool?

I had been letting Firestorm run even when I wasn't around or awake as a virtual presence made some sense even then. The situation changed several weeks ago and I stopped keeping a near-constant presence via Firestorm. One morning recently I got home and found belgian's CPU fan alarm was buzzing. The system had not failed. It was just that Winter is approaching.

I had the side of the case off for something or other and hadn't put it back into place yet. It was a very cool morning, and Firestorm wasn't running. Firestorm seems to keep one core (or one core's worth of CPU...) fairly busy. Thus the CPU got cool enough that the motherboard controlled fan wasn't needed (there is a second, uncontrolled fan, set to slow). The motherboard BIOS, however, doesn't have a very smart alarm. It makes noise if the fan isn't running - no matter if the reason it isn't running is that the system itself switched it off as unneeded.

So I put the cover back in place (after giving the idled fan a quick manual spin to hear the alarm shut off for the bit it was spinning) and fired up Firestorm to burn some cycles and warm things up. As if I hadn't already known it, this all showed that the CPU cooler really does the job.