Rubénerd!

I'd abstained from using the GUID partition tables (get it... tables?) on my ThinkPads after reading warnings on the Fedora mailing lists. Inadvertently I installed FreeBSD with GPT on my ThinkPad X40 this afternoon though, and it worked just fine!

The K-On! girls eating sushi © Kyoto Animation.

Fedora

From Pádraig Brady on the mailing lists in February:

In Fedora 16 we changed to using GPT as the default disklabel for new installs. In a few cases, mostly limited to Lenovo hardware, we found that some BIOS's would not boot from GPT. We blacklisted Lenovo, falling back to msdos labels in order to solve this.

Thanks to Matthew Garrett we found that switching on the boot flag of the GPT's protective MBR these BIOS's would then boot from GPT. Matthew wrote a patch for parted to allow controlling this flag using the disk_set pmbr_boot command in parted. This is in parted-3.0-7

I can't find them right now (of course) but I also recall the release notes or installation guide for Fedora 16 and 17 detailing the use of nogpt and how Lenovo machines were blacklisted for using GPT.

So I avoided it, and used extended partitions to overcome the 4 partition limitations of MBR that we all remember.

FreeBSD

With the release of the 9.0 series, FreeBSD defaults to GPT instead of MBR. While installing, I explicitely created an MBR table instead of using GPT in the initial disk step of bsdinstall. Curiously, doing this resulted in a string of those notorious "g_vfs_done() error=5" errors when I first booted. The same results occurred when I used gpart manually from the shell.

Just to see what would happen, I let bsdinstall create GPT partitions instead, and FreeBSD has since booted flawlessly. No joke!

Granted, this is with FreeBSD i386 on a 32bit Pentium M ThinkPad X40. My next experiment will be to use GPT with FreeBSD amd64 on my Core 2 Duo ThinkPad X61s.

I was born too late to be a part of the Fortran generation, but upon discussing the language with my sister this evening I received the following in response:

You mean 4chan?

As I said on The Twitters, I think a part of my brain just melted.

In other news, I need that font. Retro futuristic is one of the single greatest design methodologies of all time. I also need their slogan printed on a shirt.

Wish I could take credit for the comparison, but Patrick Mueller beat me to it by about four years.

I use NetBeans... or at least will continue to until it gets canned!

IBM has released a video on YouTube celebrating their centenary, but unfortunately while it does highlight some incredible work and the people behind their innovations over the years, I couldn't take it seriously.

The people involved at IBM and who "changed the way the world works" according to the video's title of course included Nazi Germany for whom they built custom machines and software to keep track of and categorise millions of prisoners for execution. IBM have released press statements over the years defending what they did based on the fact that they lost control of their German unit, a claim Edwin Black vehemently disagrees with. Ultimately though, that's not my main gripe.

My grandfather on my dad's side was a field medic for Germany in World War II, and while he never aided in the killing of people (he saved lives) I've been told he was visibly guilt ridden for much of his life, especially so when The Schades immigrated to Australia in the 1950s and he saw the people he had been working against. Even if we were to take IBMs word that they weren't entirely responsible for their German business unit during the war, some humility would still go a long way. If my sweet, caring grandfather could be humble even despite never picking up a gun, they have no excuse.

The IBM of today wouldn't aid in genocide, but not even acknowledging their past in a video supposedly about their history amounts to revisionism in my book. Which is a shame, the rest of the video was so cool, they really had the opportunity to come to terms with their past in it and use the opportunity to speak optimistically about their future.

For a while I trialled Fedora on my ThinkPad X40, but ultimately I had to give it up because the display wouldn't turn back on after going to sleep. It would be akin to me going to sleep, then waking up and not being able to open my eyes unless someone rebooted me which; I must admit; sounds awfully painful. But now it works with the Xfce Spin for some reason!

Here's where it gets interesting

After installing a vanilla installation of Fedora 13 installation install with the installation installing things with the installation and installing stuff and all that, I realised I couldn't use it because the screen wouldn't come back on when the machine went to sleep. I'm used to almost never turning off laptops thesedays, my MacBook Pro has been running almost continuously since 2006! Needless to say, this bug was a problem.

On a hunch from a friendly Fedora user about how to fix this ACPI bug, I decided to give Fedora 13 another shot recently. Remembering how long Gnome 2 takes to load on this older hardware, I elected to use an Xfce spin. I used to use Xfce exclusively and I really like it, so it was like reliving nostalgia for Red Hat and my old favourite desktop :).

To my surprise!

The screen NOW turns on after going to sleep!

NetBSD includes minor updates in their ISOs so you can download the latest version without first installing the last current release and updating it. I'm fairly sure Fedora doesn't do that, but what else could explain how this happened? Perhaps Fedora installed a software update that fixed something, or maybe its a bug with ThinkPad X40 hardware in the main Gnome 2 spin of the OS, but I know for now stuff works and I'm happy. Which is great because Sabayon had trouble with my wireless card.

Now the only bug remaining with Fedora 13 to iron out is to figure out why the icons all look terrible. This happens in all GTK applications, Gnome or Xfce, and it only happened in 13. I can live with it, but its darn ugly. Its almost as if they're not being anti-aliased properly, on FreeBSD I noticed this sometims happened if you didn't have the latest Cairo or ImageMagick installed. But that could just be me.

Last year I picked up a second hand ThinkPad X40 for a ridiculously cheap price, and this afternoon I finally got around to adding more memory. In a Department of Obviousness exclusive, it made an already stunningly awesome machine ever better!

Default configuration

IBM originally sold the ThinkPad X40 with 512MiB of memory soldered onto the motherboard and an empty PC-2700 333MHz slot for upgrading.

Unfortunately IBM manufactured several distinct models of the X40 which have different memory ceilings; you can find out which one you have by looking at the IBM label on the underside of the case. Crucial.com advised me my 7290 supported a maximum 1GiB of extra memory, so I want to Sim Lim Square and was lucky enough to still find a shop selling it!

I went with a Kingston 1GiB module for SG$75 and it's been working great :).

Day to day performance

I couldn't really tell any difference in performance booting FreeBSD, but Fedora 12 was somewhat faster. The real difference came down in operation; with 512MiB of memory I could get to a pretty Gnome or Xfce desktop but as soon as I loaded up a few tabs in Firefox things would start slowing down. Looking now I have 13 tabs open and the machine is just as fast as when I booted it!

Last year I was disappointed that I couldn't try OpenSolaris on this machine because it didn't meet it's memory requirements, but I suppose now I could give that a shot too. Now that Oracle owns Sun now though, I'm less enthusiastic at that prospect.

The NeXTSTEP

I bought this X40 for cheap because I thought it'd be a nice little netbook with a keyboard that's actually usable, but I'm surprised at how much production work I'm now getting done on it!

In light of this, the next step is to upgrade Fedora to 13! Oh yeah and the hard drive. The only design problem with the X40 is it uses a 1.8 inch ZIF hard drive which means most magnetic and SLC solid state drives for it are either painfully expensive or simply unavailable.

The performance of the current hard drive is acceptable and it's still in excellent health considering it's age, but this post on gnuru.org about using a CF card intrigues me. Apparently read/write cycles in modern CF cards have been drastically improved from the mean old days, and it would be a great way to improve battery life and add even more performance.

I left a comment for posterity :).

Last year I bought a used ThinkPad X40 to use as a lightweight alternative to my heavy MacBook Pro. One of the best investments I've ever made, I LOVE this machine! And as Mario said here, the keyboard is so much better than a netbook, even if Dave Winer shot me down in flames for suggesting so on Scripting.com ;).

The original 40GB HDD still works in mine, but I'm intrigued about what performance improvement I'd get from using a CF card and a ZIF-CF adaptor. The general responsiveness of FreeBSD and Fedora are both fine, but booting is a bit slow and initial booting takes a while.

Thanks for your post, I'll be checking this out :)

UPDATE: I've got this working, so despite this post being a day old it should be considered hysterical. I mean, historical. Freudian slip.

I'll post in more detail as soon as I'm finished.

After staying back with FreeBSD 6.x on my ThinkPad X40 because of a [reported] problem with hardware acceleration in 7.0, I decided to throw in the towel today and try getting it running. Alas, there's a quirk in the secondary IDE controller in some ThinkPad hardware that causes FreeBSD to hang on booting, and I still haven't figured out a way around it!

ACHTUNG: don't read this post if you're not a boring nerd with spare time!

According to various newsgroups, the workaround is to disable the secondary IDE controller in the ThinkPad BIOS. This supposedly has no practical impact because there's only one drive bay internally and external optical drives rely on a different controller. No worries.

Here's the rub though: at the time IBM classified such tinkering as too advanced and removed access to it from the BIOS configuration screen. The only way you can change such settings is by running PS2.EXE which is their Configuration Utility (referred to as the CU from now on) from a crusty DOS boot disk.

Extraction fail

So here's what I did: I went to the Lenovo website and downloaded the CU. Rather than just giving me the required files in a simple archive, they were contained in a nasty DOS self extracting executable called UTTPFDOS.EXE. To make matters worse, you can't just extract the files into a folder, you must provide the extractor with a blank floppy disk for it to use.

Neither my ThinkPad or my MacBook Pro have a floppy drive, so I booted Windows 2000 in VMware Fusion on my Mac, created a virtual blank floppy disk image for it to use and ran the self extracting executable thingy. I then copied the files from the virtual drive A: to a WinImage disk, then created a bootable ISO.

Booting fail

After burning the bootable ISO I attempted to boot the ThinkPad with it, but it completely ignored the disc after spinning for a few seconds. I burned another CD-R just to make sure, but got the same result.

I got to thinking: perhaps this CU wasn't itself bootable but needs to be run from a bootable DOS disk. So I downloaded a copy of the excellent FreeDOS OS, edited the ISO to include the config utility and burned another CD-R. FreeDOS started booting off the disk on the ThinkPad, but hung before it finished booting. D'oh!

Never fear though! Back in 2002 I got a copy of Connectix Virtual PC which came with a fully licenced ISO copy of IBM's PC DOS 2000 which to this day I've been using to get various things working. So I opened the ISO and added the CU to it, then burned another CD-R.

Running fail

This disc booted beautifully on the ThinkPad and I was presented with a DOS prompt. Not only that, I was able to see the CU on the disc and run it, which I did. Schweet, right?

This application cannot be run on this system

At this point it was 3am, I had a stack of useless coasters and was no closer to disabling the secondary IDE controller on this ThinkPad. I have studying to do and family matters to take care of, and I already wasted 20 minutes typing up this blog post in angst, but I'm not giving up!

Anyone have ThinkPad hardware and have been able to successfully run the PS2.EXE file from the UTTPFDOS.EXE archive?

Update

Trying out this version of the Configuration Utility. Will let you know how it goes.

It may come as complete shock to you to find out our first home computer from the early 1990s was a DOS machine. Certainly I've never mentioned this ever before on my blog here (cough!), and I certainly have never blogged about running DOS on modern hardware for nostalgic fun.

Turns out one of the unintended positives of procuring a ThinkPad X40 dating back to before IBM's hardware division was purchased by Lenovo is that IBM were themselves a DOS vendor (an oversimplification of history but it'll suffice) and supported running DOS well after everyone else jumped on the Windows bandwagon.

What this means is even for a 2004 vintage notebook computer from their download page they have complete DOS software for updating the BIOS and diagnosing problems along with drivers for networking, external optical drives, sound and their obscure, limited run USB grilled cheese sandwich waffle irons that came bundled with I'm so full of crap.

I'm stretched for time as is and probably won't be able to test any of this out for a while, but I do have a licenced copy of IBM PC DOS 7 and a ThinkPad with drivers... it might be time to get my nostalgia freak on :).

I'm gonna pop a cap in your... nah I can never pull off gangsta.

Depending on your attitude you either think the TrackPoint mouses between the keys on ThinkPads are either fantastic or dreadful. I love them, I've always been far more accurate with them than with trackpads or those trackballs older notebooks had. With all the multitouch gestures Apple now bundles with their laptop trackpads it's doubtful I'll ever get to use a TrackPoint mouse on a Mac, but I'm enjoying the experience again on my second hand ThinkPad X40.

Not only that, but as a *nix user I also love having three dedicated buttons which lets me copy and paste text in terminals as well as having the usual right click menus. Look at the mouse go! Click! Whoosh! Zoom! Blaz! Blaz?

Anyway because I got this machine second hand I quickly wanted to replace the gungy TrackPoint cap. You can buy a set of replacement TrackPoint caps from Lenovo but they're a whopping $25 so I went on eBay and picked up a set for a couple of bucks from a friendly guy in Melbourne.

The little bag of caps (product ID 73P2698) come with three different styles you can choose: the classic dome, soft dome and a concave soft rim. All three are great but I prefer the concave soft rim (top right in the photo I took above) because it fits the shape of my finger and I can apply much more pivoting force with less effort. By pushing on the edges I can also accurately move the cursor just one pixel in any direction with no effort at all. It's a beautiful thing.

If someone made an aftermarket TrackPoint mouse for Apple notebooks I would buy one in a heartbeat! I'd forgotten how much I love them.

I'm typing this post as we speak on my second hand IBM ThinkPad X40 and I have to say I'm thrilled with it! While obviously larger in dimensions than a netbook, I just can't get over how light it is. I put it in my bag I usually haul my 15 inch MacBook Pro in along with my folder of study papers and as I carried it to the Boatdeck for my morning cup of coffee the bag felt like there was only the folder in it!

The machine currently has Windows XP Professional installed and even has the genuine OEM licence sticker on it. Given I'm not sure how much Windows software I'll need to run for my studies in the future I've decided to shrink the Windows partition and put FreeBSD on it with a boot menu.

The main thing I was worried about was the tiny 1.8" ZIF PATA hard drive, I had read plenty of stories by people claiming the 4800RPM drive is noisy and has slow seek times but it booted XP pretty quickly and loading applications didn't seem to take too long at all. Given this is a second hand machine I will be running SpinRite on the drive before I put any data onto it to triple check that it's functioning properly.

Even if the internal drive turns out to be working flawlessly, once I've got a bit more money I will be looking into a replacement if only to protect myself against errors that I can't see right now. 1.8" ZIF PATA drives are uncommon but not too difficult to find, 60GB Samsung drives seem to be going for around $80. Another option is Amazon.com stocks 1.8" ZIF PATA 16GB SLC drives for US$140 which is way too steep for my budget but could be something I get in the distant future if I still have this machine.

As for the other features, I've been using it lightly for half an hour and the bundled battery still reports a 90% charge which is pleasantly surprising! I was also able to connect to our WPA2 secured AirPort WiFi network at home without any problems, the next thing to test will be whether it can use my university's VPN.

I don't intend to spend much money on this machine but I did pick up a few replacement mouse stick caps for a couple of bucks, and a 12.1" screen protector for another few bucks at the Mawson Lakes Apple shop of all places.

I got me a ThinkPad netbook! Boo yah!