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.

After initially mentioning here that my ThinkPad X40 had no suspend issues on Fedora 14, the reported issues with suspending on that hardware have sporadically started to occur. I don't know why it works sometimes and not other times, unless a recent software update stuffed something up.

Fortunately I have a solution! If your ThinkPad X40 doesn't come out of standby, hold the power button, then hit a random number of keys for upwards of 20 seconds. That seems like a long time and the screen remains dark the entire time, but eventually it wakes up.

Arch Linux never did this on this machine, so I'm thinking its a Red Hat issue, or maybe the latest kernel doesn't like this machine either. Oh well, se a vida é.

Just grabbed the latest release of Fedora for my adorable ThinkPad X40 from their tracker. Apparently I'm late to the download party though, I'm not seeding for anyone ;).

The background is the bongily dengy diggy diggy

For those who don't know, my MacBook Pro runs Snow Leopard, my primary desktop runs FreeBSD 8.0 RELEASE (used to be -STABLE, but RELEASE works just fine for me now) and my ThinkPad dual-boots FreeDOS and Fedora owing to some stability issues with FreeBSD issues on that hardware, and it works a little better with closed wireless dongle dengy deng diggy diggys.

Why does it also run FreeDOS? Because its the only system that will allow me to run that creaky old software for my giant purple particle accelerator downstairs, that's why. Sorry you asked?

I used to use the Xfce spin, but going back to the default GNOME one for a while. Don't tell anyone, but I've been secretly using Gedit for some stuff, the syntax highlighting is really quite pretty :).

Why does issues need all those S's?

Now apparently certain models of ThinkPads still have suspending issues, which is a problem because having never been suspended from school I'm not sure how to take it. I also hope they fix that nasty GTK graphics bug, for some reason it didn't affect my desktop when it was installed on it, but my ThinkPad looked downright awful.

Link arms, don't make them

• Fedora Project
• Fedora bittorrent tracker
• Fedora Xfce Spin
• FreeDOS
• Rubenerd.com post on Fedora 13's GTK graphics bug

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 :)

Each morning I get out of bed, check batteries, have a shower, check batteries, brush my teeth, check batteries. While going through this morning's ritual I stopped dead in my tracks, not because I had run out of battery power, but because of a realisation: I don't own these batteries, these batteries own me.

I always forget to plug them in

I'm one of these obsessive people who has to have his computers doing things while he's asleep, generally either compiling huge FreeBSD ports or doing some heavy file compression. I can't really do these tasks during the day because I need my machine so I can follow along with the lecturer's dull university PowerPoint presentations with three hundred words crammed into each slide, amongst other production needs.

Blu-Ray anime needs a heck of a lot of processing power to play. Wait, you didn't read that.

What I try my best to do is charge batteries while I sleep for the same reason, but I nearly always forget to charge something, which entails a frantic mad dash in the mornings to plug them in so I can get at least a 20% charge before I have to run out the door. I'm notorious for doing this with my iTelephone which is even worse given I use it as an alarm clock.

Then there are batteries I have that are so shot as to be useless in any practical sense. As I blogged back in January, despite being the forth one I've bought since 2006 the battery in my MacBook Pro barely holds enough charge to keep the machine running if I unplug it to take it to another room. It has single-handedly justified the existence of my tiny ThinkPad X40 which I take to all my classes. Ironically I bought this machine with it's original battery second hand for peanuts and I can still get a solid three hours out of it!

Where are my jetpacks and ultracapacitors?

I'm doing computer science and information technology not computer engineering so I'm ill equipped to discuss this topic, but I was under the impression even as late as last year that ultracapacitors were going to take over the world and give us lightweight super high capacity energy that could charge so fast you'd blow every fuse and circuit within a few hundred kilometres. Alas here I am still with heavy, bulky batteries.

Do you have a regime for recharging your batteries? Do you do the recommended full discharge once a week? Why did I think of that episode of Futurama where Honest Bender disposes of the toxic waste into the mutant's underground world when I asked that previous question?

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.

As this evening comes to a close I'm left with a weird feeling of reflection and uncertainty, despite potentially having some direction and purpose. I'm close to finishing my exams, I only have two outstanding assignment issues and the real estate agent in charge of managing my landlord's property finally got around to inspecting the house prior to the open day on Sunday. The landlord wants to sell.

I've got FreeBSD 8.0 gleefully installing on my ThinkPad X40 next to me, my MacBook Pro is frantically compressing a bunch of disc images so I can scrape up some spare gigabytes of hard drive space, the rain outside has stopped but you can still smell it, the ceiling lights are off so the monitors are casting an almost spooky glow and long shadows across the table and down the hall, my bottle of water is empty but I'm still a little thirsty, I'm shaking a little but that's normal, and because my sister went back to Singapore before me, some pretty, quiet piano playing through the speakers and a quiet hum of computer cooling fans are the only sounds other than the cicadas I can hear.

I still find it infinitely fascinating that on some days I blog a lot, talk to people on Skype and Twitter messages like there's no tomorrow; on other days despite not having more or less work to do than the day when I was posting five hundred blog entries I can barely bring myself to write one, and when I do get around to posting that lone entry it's a rambling post with little substance, value or purpose. Hey, like this one.

Well it's been really nice talking to you, but I'd best be off to bed. I'll go ahead and sprinkle some hyperlinks through this post, then I'll hop into bed and distract worrying thoughts by weighing in the pros and cons of using the Xfce verses Gnome-Light ports.

Night.

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.

Fedora's default Gnome desktop has been tweaked a bit since version 11 and while I still had to rearrange it a bit to get it the way I use it on other systems, it's very usable. I've found that with much of the Fedora experience; its configured in a different way to what I'd like, has some software I don't want and some software missing, but they're all easy to fix and when I do, it works great.

As I discussed last week Fedora comes with Mono which is kinda creepy (to use technical McGee NCIS jargon) which I hastily uninstalled, but I'm really pleased to see Gnote is now included by default instead of Tomboy. Red Hat and the Fedora team should be applauded for this move, and other Linux distributions and BSDs should follow suit. The official Gnome project team should also take notice that a major distribution has ignored an official package and replaced it with a less encumbered, faster, lighter, equally capable alternative.

Seal of The Approval

Of all the commercially backed Linux distributions, I think Fedora is by far the most polished and usable. If given the choice I'd still prefer to run FreeBSD because I've been spoilt by jails, security levels, ZFS, rc.conf, make world and The Handbook, and I still have a little desktop in Singapore running Slack, but Fedora will probably be the one I use when I have to use Linux, or on notebook hardware that FreeBSD traditionally has more trouble with.

Now I just have to learn not to accidentally try and run portsnap ;).

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...!

Installer

Given the now defunct Red Hat Linux was the first GNU/Linux distribution I ever used (I bought a boxed version of it from Challenger in Funan Centre!), it was a bit of a nostalgia trip to see the Bluecurve icons in the Anaconda installer... I was using Red Hat Linux before Mac and FreeBSD! To save myself burning another CD I created a bootable USB key from a LiveCD following the easy instructions on the Fedora wiki.

I personally prefer the FreeBSD and Debian text installers, particularly when it comes to partitioning drives, but that probably has more to do with what I'm used to.

Default desktop

In keeping with the Red Hat tradition I remembered, Fedora ships with Gnome by default. I tend to switch between Gnome and Xfce on different machines, but for notebooks I find the flexible and easy to use Gnome networking tools put it ahead.

Debian and FreeBSD implement Gnome in a fairly vanilla way, but Fedora does things a bit differently which caught me off guard. Fortunately it didn't take long to rearrange the desktop to resemble what I was used to :).

I'm so thoroughly out of practise with RPM having got so used to pkgsrc, FreeBSD ports and Debian's apt-get that I took the easy way out and used gpk-application to install my apps. Curiously, Fedora 11 didn't install the Gnome Configuration Editor which I would have considered to be a core application, nor did it come with Gnome Games so I couldn't get my Python Sudoku and Tetravex freak on, but gpk-application made it easy to get them installed.

Hardware

I haven't ever felt the need to use the infrared or Bluetooth with this ThinkPad X40 so I can't vouch for whether they work or not. What I can say though is the SD card slot recognised my data card, xorg mostly worked without problems (see below) and the Intel wireless card was detected and connected to a WPA network sooner than I could say our gibberish 64 character password.

Problems

Disappointingly, Fedora does have a small quirk that neither Debian or FreeBSD had. Whenever I bring the machine out of standby, the backlight refuses to come on. I can just make out the screen enough to fire up a Terminal and initiate a shutdown so it'll restart and the backlight will come back on, but it's a pain. This ThinkWiki page details a few kernel parameters to define in the grub configuration, but that only seemed to solve the problem for me sometimes.

Also, for some reason taking screenshots results in the same garbled mess as shown at the beginning of the post. This is probably an xorg problem, but it's also one that fresh installs of Debian and FreeBSD didn't have.

Thoughts

Aside from the standby issue, so far so good. I've got the OpenSolaris Nimbus theme installed for a change (look at that, my ThinkPad looks like the computers at uni!) and am finding it to be a productive environment to work in.

From my experience I reckon Fedora and Slackware with the Slackbook are the the closest any Linux distribution has come to the FreeBSD Handbook. Fedora's online documentation is excellent, and their wiki contains a ton of useful information.

I'm counting down the days until Fedora 12, here's hoping it irons out some of these bugs. I've got too much work and studying to do to chase them down myself!

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.