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I'd been using an old laptop in the kitchen wanted something newer. A while ago I saw that the Toshiba Satellite L755D-S5104 (15.6 inch 1366x768 screen, Quad core, AMD/ATI HD6520 graphics from the A6 processor, 4 GB RAM expandable to 8 GB, 500 GB HDD) could be had for a low price, but was just above Best Buy's 18-month no-interest threshold. I went for it, planning to make it the new caspian. And then ran into trouble as I couldn't get a Linux distribution that filled my requirements to run on it.
Each distribution had some issue and with many I simply didn't get any video at all. I wound up going to PCLinuxOS's 32 bit version for a while as that at least gave me video. Then I tried Pardus when a DistroWatch comment said that worked for someone with similar problems. Alas, Pardus gave me other headaches, mainly dealing with audio and rather random behavior. More researched revealed the problem many distributions had: The HD6520 video system was too new and the 3.0 Linux kernel did not handle it well. The 3.2 kernel could supposedly deal with the HD6520. Looking around, there was something that had that and looked like it would solve my audio problems: Xubuntu 12.04, which is still in alpha.
Xubuntu 12.04 (alpha 2) is better than I expected an alpha to be. Sure, it has a couple bugs but so far none that cause me real trouble. They were minor setbacks at worst and either had almost trivial work-arounds or simply didn't matter to me. The result? I have what I set out to have: a 64-bit Linux that gives me video and audio properly and can run Firestorm.
The old laptop? I'm not sure if I'll do anything with it. It is 10+ years old after all. However it does run, if slowly, and nothing is actually wrong with it. I have this feeling it should be doing something, but I've no idea what. There is a name available for it on the network: shan.
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.
Nice idea, but...
14 October 2011 23:00
There are many, many things I could talk about but right now I'll settle on a more mundane one. I've been running ConnochaetOS on caspian for a while and some things about it grate a bit. So when I heard someone gushing about Bodhi Linux that could run on even a 386, I decided to try it. I am both impressed and disappointed in the result.
Impressed: It boots as a LiveCD, even on caspian. Takes a long, long time, but it does come up.
Disappointed: Like ConnochaetOS it defaults to an ugly 800x600 rather than correct 1024x786, but the showstopper is: Network? What's a network?
I can deal with the resolution, but the network issue? No. Not fiddling with that, not right now. I'll keep running Conn...OS and maybe try Bodhi again later. And since I've heard that the plan is to move away from being Debian-based (something I consider as a Good Thing) later may be better.
After rebuilding ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
jmaynard's old computer and then rebuilding what is/will become percheron I must have gotten into a get old hardware working again mood. A few years ago I out DeLi linux on a 90 MHz Pentium machine and was impressed with icewm, though getting things working was a bit involved.
( Not quite as involved now... )
I am not a fan of the Debian family of distributions, and it's not just because of the idiotic GNU/ prefixing. I had found that *buntu tended to "help" me too much by getting in the way. Even so, I am now running Xubuntu 10.04[1] on the laptop (palomino on the rare occasion I boot it into Windows, andalusian for Linux). Why? Salix had video issues I could not get around and Xubuntu is the lighter of the *buntu family (While I don't mind KDE, it is heavy and Kubuntu has long been the "red-headed stepchild" of *buntu. Gnome? The less said of it the better.) and it's available in 64-bit right now, it boots, it installs, and it doesn't have any video weirdness - although despite the Hardware Driver tool saying it might help, one must not install the fglrx ATI/AMD video driver. It actually makes things worse.
It hasn't been all automatic. I am really glad I had previous Linux experience before this. Getting the wireless working was an adventure. Realtek seems to only acknowledge Windows when one goes driver hunting, though they do have a linux driver. Finding it is a challenge. Downloading it is another challenge. I had to resort to much Google searching to find the right page to find the driver's exact name, then Google search for that and download it from a third party. Once installed, the only real trouble I had was at my folks' place and that was solved by re-setting the wireless router. There are a few wireless networks in the neighborhood here, but only one is wide open.
The Synaptic touchpad had the intensely annoying "tap-to-click" (which means, "bump to screw up focus") that has no simple GUI means of being shut off. Eventually I found someone else had the same issue and there was a post about how to disable tap-to-click. That bit of script saves much cussing.
Getting Phoenix running meant getting the 32-bit libraries (easy enough, ia32 in Synaptic) and disabling the hardware warning since it doesn't know the video is good enough without the lousy fglrx driver installed. Getting streaming audio involved editing the startup script since it disabled gstreamer if it found itself on a 64-bit platform and evidently doesn't play nice with Fmod OpenAL on 64-bit Xubuntu.
The rest, so far, has been installing the programs I expect to be around or finding things close enough in the Xubuntu repository, and tweaking the XFCE setup to also be what I've come to expect. There is more setup to do. This time, I am NOT simply copying over Opera config files, but slowly rebuilding the bookmarks and settings so they're clean. I might copy the config files back from the laptop once that is done.
I still need to figure out to get the internal microphone and camera to work (and how to be sure the camera is disabled when I don't want it on... there's always the surefire method: a bit of tape). I think those are the last of the hardware type issues.
And just as all that is going on, PCLinuxOS's Texstar announces that PCLinuxOS will be getting a 64-bit version, which had it happen earlier would have been the right answer, or at least a better one than *buntu. When it finally is released, I will be trying it. I will be surprised (and disappointed) if it doesn't work better than Xubuntu.
All that said, it's nice having having new hardware. Things are, as expected, fast. While running two sessions of Phoenix does push things (I think one needs at least n+1 cores to properly run n sessions of Phoenix), it doesn't bog down badly, though the CPU usage goes up to near if not quite 100%. The 'desktop' machine (now 7+ years old!) bogs down badly if I try that. And even though I am running Linux, I usually end up needing to reboot (not just restart X) after that.
[1] Yes, I know 10.10 is out. But 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" is Long Term Support and, unlike, 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat", runs and installs cleanly. I agree with ESR, "Ubuntu 10.10 is fucked up."
Last week Monday I bought the thing and didn't have time to do much more than sleep once home. Since then I've done more, of course. I considered BLAG (A 64 bit version of Fedora, really), Unity (a group that split off from PCLinuxOS), Arch and ArchBang, and Salix (Slackware with dependency checking). BLAG looked nice aside from not having codecs and since it's Fedora (Red Hat) based, I know from experience what a pain it is to get them. Also, the new release of Fedora has a fair amount of detractors who are going, "Hang on, isn't this supposed to be BETTER than the last one? Why is so much broken?"
I tried Unity and found it was a "base" system - not meant to be run by itself, really, but for other distributions to have a common starting base. I tried ArchBang and it refused to boot, claiming hardware conflicts that nothing else seems to have any trouble with. I have not (yet) tried just plain Arch though I might yet.
The idea of something Slackware-based (fast, non-crufty) with dependency resolution appealed and so SalixOS won out... so far. After squashing Windows 7 into a mere (ha!) 100 GB of the drive and further partitioning the drive to give Linux space to live, I installed the 64-bit version of SalixOS and it seemed to go smoothly. It detected Windows, asked if I want Linux to be able to see the Window partitions and how much access there should be, and set up lilo[1] to dual-boot. Synaptic was there and even Opera was in the repository. Pretty good... but not great.
I've had to edit fstab to get the Windows partitions truly accessible as I intended (user can see it all, but it's read only so as not to risk messing up the NTFS filesystem it uses), I tweaked lilo.conf so Linux was the default and not Windows. I had to use the command line alsamixer to get the speakers to make sound. Alright, it's Slackware-ish and some configuration is to be expected.
But there are two big issues. One is that the wireless setup wasn't discovered on install. Fortuantely the wired stuff works without any issue, so I can do some stuff. I expected to need to do some setup myself with that, but it'd be nice to have the wireless 'card' detected. Supposedly the linux kernel has support for the chip (Realtek rtl8192e if you're curious) so no added driver should be needed. But SalixOS doesn't have the firmware file that would make it work. I've search quite a bit and can't find the file. I can find where it used to be (all dead links) or people talking about it, but not the needed thing itself.
The other is the graphics. For most stuff, the default install works just fine. But for one program, the one I based my buying decision on being able to run, it doesn't work. It flickers. Just the one window. Everything else is fine. I've tried installing the proprietary ATI drivers (ATI Radeon Mobility HD 4200, for what it's worth) and the flickering.. slowed down. I've left a question about that on the Salix forum, but haven't gotten any reply as yet.
I do have some time. I can still return the laptop (30 days...) and maybe try another. Or try another distribution. It is rather frustrating that things that ought to "just work" don't. I've even considering going to the dark(er) side and trying some non-GNOME-ish version of *buntu. I'd rather not do that. Maybe I will try Arch, I can always go back to Salix easily enough if I get a solution for it. Windows? No. I considered it for a bit, but then it reminded me why I hadn't used it in years. Windows 7 does seem a lot like Windows 2000 (for a Microsoft product, that's a compliment) but it was still a relief to boot into something else, even if it was just the partitioning tool... which shrunk the Windows partiton more than Windows claimed was possible.
[1] Odd to see lilo, as I am now so used to seeing grub as boot manager, but Slackware can be rather old school about things if they still work.
A few days ago I started having computer problems that were not purely software related. One piece of software which is rather demanding of the video system seemed to cause a hard crash as I could only run it for a few minutes. Yet I could run everything else for hours. But previously I did not have that problem so something was wrong. I had heard an odd fan noise a bit earlier and so started looking at the fans.
The first time I looked the case fan was operating, the power supply fan was operating but the supply was hot rather than just warm, the CPU fan and the video card fan were also operating. A day or so later with things worse I found the problem. The power supply had two fans. One wasn't moving, the other was only barely moving. I shut things down and used a different computer as well as jmaynard's eeePC.
A couple days of using the eeePC convinced me that I would not be replacing the laptop(s) with a netbook as I had pondered doing. The thing is rather underpowered (as expected) and the keyboard is only almost big enough to not be frustrating.
Monday we went to Mankato and I bought a replacement power supply, which I am now using. We also decided to take a look at what laptops might be had. The kicker is that I need a non-intel graphics chipset since I now want very good graphic performance under Linux and intel graphics simply won't cut it. The first time I looked around I got sticker shock as the only things I saw that fit were in the $1,200+ range. But this time we saw a few things in the $600+ range. Combined with Best Buy's (yeah, but it was really the only choice) 18-month interest-free financing it got seriously tempting. After looking at three different models I rejected the GateWay with the Turion not (just) for being a GateWay or the Turion but mainly from poor keyboard layout. The process repeated and after much questions and electronic forms being filled out, I now have a Toshiba Satellite L675. That's an AMD Phenom II X2 (dual core 64 bit) at 2.9 GHz, with 4GB RAM and a 500 GB HDD. And ATI Radeon 4250 graphics. And Windows Home Premium, which I plan to use very little. Oh, and a big beautiful 17.3 inch 1600 x 900 pixel screen. And a keyboard that is Not Tiny.
I've used it only briefly so far. Just a bit of setup and making the 4 DVD set (yowza!) of recovery discs. I know I have some issues to resolve, such as if I should go with a 32 or 64 bit Linux distribution and if 64, which one. Also, transporting this thing will require something other than the laptop bag I've been using. The L675 is too big to fit in that bag - and I probably want it better protected anyway should I actually travel with it.
I put Wolvix on percheron and got things set up about how I think they ought to be. There wasn't much to move off of percheron as the only thing on it besides a fresh Ultima install was a set of mp3 files made from tape, those being the result of using the Musix LiveCD.
That was a practice run for the laptop and it went fairly well. So after letting things sit for a day or so and one last boot into Ultima just to be sure I had everything off of caspian it was time to install Wolvix.
( Wolvix installs and tweaks )
I've gone and installed Ultima Linux on the Compaq Armada 7800 which I've named caspian.
This weekend wasn't just the trip to Sioux Falls. I also tried to make some progress with a computer or two. There was some progress, but not as much as I'd have liked.
Laptop Upgrade
3 August 2005 11:00The laptop computer I've had for a few years is "old and busted" in the real sense of being old (it's a 75MHz 486) and busted (the thing won't close - it threatens to twist the display off if moved very far). I can put up with the old for many things, but the busted pretty thoroughly removes the point of a laptop machine: portability.
Fortunately, all that won't much matter as when jmaynard recently visited michaelmink he was given a newer laptop and accessories to haul back for me. This machine is a Compaq Armada, with I think a 266MHz Pentium II. Nowhere near today's multi-GHz machines, but still quite a step up for me. And for what I expect to do with it, more than sufficient.
( Now I have a few decisions to make. )
Spring COLT?
11 April 2003 13:45It seems that early in a year is when I tend to get somewhat back into working on the COLT. And then something happens (faire season, general laziness, whatever) to mess that up and I wind up even more behind than I was before.
Now that the comics are sorted and arranged (if not completely, nearly so.. still have to stow many) I've been starting in on the COLT again. So far it's just updating the Production Index - the list of WB numbers for the stories printed. But I do want to get back to actually writing up the issues and such. If I can keep at it, I will eventually catch up, right? Well, if I keep at it often enough.
jmaynard and I will be off to a hamfest in Madison, WI this weekend. I'm pondering taking my old laptop, shan, and a couple comic books along and seeing if I can maybe do something useful Saturday evening. The evening before a distant event is generally pretty much wasted, so I may as well try it. If I get nothing done, well, no change from the usual.
I didn't take my laptop with me anywhere last year, but Jay had his and could dial up with it, at least if the ISP covered the area we where in. Also, we've gotten to know many folks and tend to wind up going out for supper with some folks. Sometimes a low key thing on Friday. More often as part of an "invasion" (of a local restaurant) Saturday night. And Sunday night tends to have the drive back home.
So I guess I take shan with me a couple times and see how things work out. Shan isn't terribly powerful by today's standards (it's a 486DX75, I as I recall)but since all I plan to do is text editing, it's more than enough. If I actually get to using it, that is.
