Merlin Mann from 42 + 1 folders once suggested in a podcast that if you want to apply yourself too some creative writing you should start typing and refuse to use the backspace key; just pretend it’s not there. I’m far to obsessive compulsive to follow this advice verbatim because typos freak me out like breakfast cereal without soy milk, but that compulsion aside I’m going to give it a try.
Given I didn’t have any exams today, I took a break from studying for a couple of hours and installed the final release of Fedora 12 that was released yesterday. So far so good, I torrented the i386 DVD image and installed it on my ThinkPad with no problems at all.
After doing some more experimenting with the unstable release of Debian, I so royally messed up my ThinkPad I decided to wipe it clean and start again! For a change and given 12 is coming in 6 days, I thought I’d try out Fedora. So far I’m impressed. Now if only it could take screenshots and go on standby…!
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.
My relative subjective view of sluggishness/performance on a ThinkPad X40. Shorter bars are better.
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 won’t be giving up Xfce on my FreeBSD desktop any time soon, but Gnome on my ThinkPad X40 keeps finding new ways to surprise me. Its a beautiful thing, and its free!
This might be an old feature, but its one I’ve found wildly useful: the ability to set locations in the panel clock. Other desktops let you do this, but it’s all the little extras that Gnome does. Perhaps KDE 4.2 does, I haven’t had the chance to try yet.
When you define a series of locations they appear on a map of the world complete with an approximate night/day cast. Under the map each location is shown with digital and analogue clocks, and what I’ve found absolutely brilliant is each timezone is displayed relative to where you are, NOT to GMT! For example I can see Singapore is 1:30 behind us here in Adelaide, and Jim Kloss is 17:30 behind.
By default it’s turned off, but if you use Gnome click the clock on your panel and click Locations.
I know I’ve posted about it far too much, but I just have to post one more time about my experiences with this amazing little machine.
It’s been over a week since I installed Debian Lenny on my newly bought second hand ThinkPad X40 and it’s exceeded all my expectations. I honestly have not been as impressed with a non-Mac piece of hardware for years. It’s extremely lightweight, has a fantastic full keyboard and despite having an old battery I still get 3+ hours with the screen set to full brightness and WiFi on. I’ve literally walked into lectures and tutorials at uni with just this machine which has been such a tremendous relief on my back compared to lugging my 15″ MacBook Pro. It’s light, solidly built and it’s 1.4GHz Pentium M with a scant 512MiB of memory perform far above what I expected.
As an Xfce user on FreeBSD the other thing I’ve been surprised by is how much I’m enjoying Gnome 2.26. The problem is I tend to use FreeBSD on older machines and servers so Gnome has always been overkill but it works beautifully even on this older hardware. The built in graphical tools allow me to update software, configure wireless networks and even have true composting video effects which means I can have translucent menubars and all that cool stuff. The system also boots up quickly and standby works. It’s almost feels as if IBM shipped me this ThinkPad with the software preinstalled.
I am still primarily a Mac guy, but I must admit I’m tempted at some point when I decide to replace my MacBook Pro to spend the same amount of money on a brand new ThinkPad and put Debian or FreeBSD on it. If Debian with one of the heaviest *nix desktop environments performs this amazingly well on a four year old machine, imagine how well it would run on a current one! It’d be stunning!
Having used Macs I cringe at the very sight of so many nasty, horribly flimsy, cheap and plastic PC laptops being passed off as well designed and expensive (not to even start on the budget craptops) but my dad always said his ThinkPads were fantastic machines and now that I have a tiny one of my own I can honestly say I see the appeal.
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!
I'm Ruben Schade, welcome to my labour of love mix of tech, anime, thoughts and nonsense from Singapore and Australia. Thanks for stopping by.
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