T61 and Linux
So after quite a bit time playing around with my T61 and Gentoo I’m really surprised that there are actually so less problems. I admit that you have to use very often bleeding edge drivers (i.e. to get sound under ALSA working), but hey thats brand new hardware! And the awesome documentation on the Gentoo Wiki about the T61 and ThinkWiki helped a lot to get most of the things running. I just can encourage everybody who has a Thinkpad (preferable a T61) to contribute his experiences to this two projects in order to get a even better Linux support on this notebook. There are still some unsolved issues about suspend/hibernation, the APS, Nvidia Drivers and some other minor stuff. But nothing to big, so we can hope to get them solved in a few weeks/months.
But apparently Linux has a issue with SATA performance under x86_64 (link1, link2), which is quite annoying and I’m thinking about switching back to i386 and see how it looks there…
Welcome to Germany…
Yesterday a group of about 50 persons attacked and chased through the city 8 Indians at a village fair in the town of Mügeln. Mügeln, which a small town in Saxony, german state well known for its aggression potential from right wing groups(so called “Neo-Nazis“). 14 people(8 Indians, 4 police man, 2 attackers) got hurt badly and hat to get treated in a hospital.
The major of this town said to this incident: “There are no right wing groups in our town. IF there was a right wing background it must have been people from our neighbor towns.”(netzzeitung.de german) How could somebody so ignorant? There is in almost in every little/medium/big town in Germany a group of people which carrying right wing thoughts. And if there where 50 people chasing these victims through the town there have to be at least some locals…
But this is a problem what you can find all over Germany. Right wing extremist are just accepted… as long as they just sitting around, making party and talking bullshit about “foreigners” and all this usual prejudices which you can find in almost everybody’s mind about something unusual and alien. But when they really start to act, everybody gets horrible upset (“Something like this in our nice little town… I just can’t understand why!”) and wants to do something against the brown swamp. And you will see, after a few months or days, depends on how big the incident was, everybody goes back to normal and ignores this strange, hairless guys on the neighbor table in the pub.
I’m sick of it!
irrepressible.info
After removing the ugly centrino / winodows vista / energy star stickers from my laptop, I put a irrepressible.info sticker on the back of the lit. Irrepressible.info is a Amnesty International campaign, which fights against censorship in internet, especially in blogs, chats and forums. So help to defend the Freedom Of Speech and fight against censorship!
To Do:
- sign the pledge on irrepressible.org (even if it’s a little bit old)
- add censored content to your blog/website
- become member of Amnesty International
- set up a TOR server
- … and so on!
Use your mind! Get active!
Lenovo T61 NC11DGE [hardware]
After about 3 weeks with my new notebook I think it’s time to tell you my experience with it. At first I thought about making a complete review, but well firstly I’m to lazy and secondly there are enough good ones around in the net(). So I just gonna tell you about some strange/interesting things which caught my eye, by examining my new toy. If you buy your Thinkpad in Germany you can’t customize it like in the US Lenovo shop, so I had to stick with a pretty preconfigured version. Furthermore the specs on the German Lenovo Page are not complete or even incorrect, so I had some interesting surprises(red marked in the hardware specs)!
Hardware Specs
- Intel Centrino Pro (Santa Rosa/Mobile 965GM)
- Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 at 2000 MHz
- 2048 MB PC-5300 DDR2 SD-RAM
- 80 GB SATA, 5400 RPM,8 MB Cache (Hitachi Travelstar 5K080)
- CD-RW/DVD Combo in Ultrabay Slim
- 14.1″ TFT, 1440×900 WXGA
- Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100
- Intel 4965AGN Wireless Chip (IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n(draft) )
- Intel PRO/1000 Gigabit Ethernet
- Bluetooth with Enhanced Data Rate (BDC-2) with Broadcom Chip
- Intel HDA Audio (AD1984)
- Finger Print Reader
- TPM Chip (Atmel or National Semiconductor, not sure yet)
- 7-cell Lithium ion Battery
- Ports:
- Expansion Bus port (for Essential Port Replicator, Advanced Dock, Advanced Mini Dock)
- ExpressCard and PCMCIA Slot
- External Display (VGA)
- External Microphone/Line-In
- Internal Microphone
- Headphone / Line out
- IEEE 1394 (Mini)
- RJ-11
- RJ-45
- 3 USB 2.0
Working with this laptop is quiet nice. The keyboard works excellent for a laptop keyboard and the trackpoint is a useful alternative option to the also built in touchpad. I’m working with both of them and switch randomly or depending on the task.
I went for a integrated graphic because firstly the driver support under Linux is better (open source driver) and for lesser power consumption, because some tests indicated a very short running time on battery. So I also decided to go for a 7-cell battery instead of the normal 4-cell one. But even with this I’m a little bit disappointed about the running time, but I haven’t tweaked anything till know under Linux so maybe it gets better. But one confusing thing happened in the first charging cycles… at one point I had a full capacity of 73 Wh but thereafter i had again something like 68 Wh which is quiet a difference… so let’s see time will show.
The ThinkLight which helps to illuminate the keyboard in the dark is a quiet nice idea, but actually mostly the light of the screen is enough. And talking about the screen… actually its pretty good and 14.1″ are a good compromise between small form factor and useful screen size. It’s very bright and you can regulate it in 7 levels of brightness. But even with the brightest setup there is a strange dark shadow at the bottom of the screen, it’s not really annoying, but I’m a little bit concerned about a damage of the backlight…
All in all it’s a really nice Laptop and like like to work with it(especially having the freedom to sit on my balcony in the sun and working on the Laptop, how I do it now, is just awesome) I’m not sure about the battery, but this will turn out later. At the moment I’m just enjoying the speed of my new toy!
Later on I gonna write a little bit about my experience with Gentoo Linux on it. So stay tuned.
Wallpaper Page
Woohoo! My first really useful Blog entry!
I added a new page, which offers 3 desktop wallpapers at the moment. Unfortunately till now I can publish only the wallpapers in the widescreen version For some reasons wordpress doesn’t offer a thumbnail for the 4:3 versions. Probably it has to do something with a maximal resolution which wordpress can shrink to thumbnail format.
update: It was really caused by a to high resolution(more information here) I added another wallpaper and published them under kde-look.org.
All the wallpapers are licensed under the Creative Commons BY-SA license, which allows everybody to use the images as long you mention my name as author. If you use this images in your own images you have to put it under the same license, so everybody can keep on enjoying these offered freedoms by the license. In this way it’s quiet similar to the GNU GPL.
So enjoy the wallpapers and stay tuned for some updates as soon as I solved some technical problems!
Hello world!
Welcome to my (first) Blog!
As I know myself this blog gonna be deserted in a few days… But hey at least I tried!
At the moment I’m still thinking about what to put into this blog, but probably technology, science and politics gonna be the major topics. Maybe I mix from time to time some strange thoughts or ideas, but don’t tell me later on I hadn’t warn you!
As you have probably already recognized English is not my first language, so I apologize for any misspellings and some “German only” entrys.
Last but not least I want mention my girlfriends blog, because without here I probably wouldn’t have started a blog at all. Thank you for so much!
so long let’s see when I gonna make my next entry
