Destroyer of laptops
Jyasu, Destroyer of Laptops, has finally witnessed a display hinge
failure on shion (noted in a post late last month, but the hinge
has been working itself loose since the last maintenance call and subsequent
disassembly). Rang Dell for what will probably be the last maintenance
request for shion; I'm having both the casing and keyboard
replaced (I first noted the "j" key problem well over a year ago). I love
"hinge broken" calls -- they're blissfully short, since you're not required
to jump through hours of diagnostic hoops to identify the problem.
Meanwhile, a summary of what's been happening on luc, the
ThinkPad T43 that is replacing shion (but has yet to be seen in the
wild):
I really, really want a Windows XP Pro Install CD, not a set
of recovery CDs that "recover" any Linux partitions to oblivion.
I have recovered my Meta (Windows) keys under Linux by mapping the
page back/page fwd buttons to Meta_L and Meta_R. I have also recovered the
menu button (mapped the Fn key to Menu), with the following two caveats: 1)
if you hold the Fn key down for more than a second or so, the T43 gives up
hope that you're ever going to hit another key and sends the Fn key to the
kernel. This is surprising the first time you accidentally bring up a menu
when you go to tweak the brightness. 2) wmaker doesn't seem to
want to recognize the Menu key. In fact, I tried mapping the page back/fwd
keys to Menu as well, with no luck. Normal applications pick this up just
fine, but I can't get the root menu up now. Bleh.
I have for the moment resigned myself to having no software control
over the PC speaker, bleh. Migrating to ALSA and finally permitting mixing
of multiple PCM sources to work around this; over time I'll have everyone
converted over to a synthesized waveform that sounds suspiciously like a
PC speaker beep, but at much quieter volume.
I'm taking this opportunity to migrate from my ancient
junkbuster proxy to Privoxy.
So far it's doing a nice job with minimal customizations; at some point I
intend to try my hand at its filters to scrub the font changes out of the
NYTimes stylesheets, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. It seems to be
much more elegant in general design than junkbuster, and despite my initial
reservations, I'm finding the web interface for editing configuration to be
quite reasonable.
The trackpad is a definite improvement in quality; the keyboard is,
depending on perspective, an improvement or a problem -- it feels much more
rugged than Dell keyboards, but on the flipside I have to hit keys a bit
harder than before, which isn't so great for my wrists. Keyboard layout is
a serious annoyance for one reason -- left control is not flush-left, which
makes typing ^@ a royal pain for my fingers. It does not seem wise to try
to map Fn to a control key.
No display hinge problems yet! Yay!
I attempted to do the right thing and use open source video drivers,
but I kept getting screen corruption the first time I left the X display, so
I have switched over to the fglrx driver. The latter driver
has some... eccentricities... and it took awhile to get it configured such
that opening a new window didn't interrupt audio playback for half a second,
but it's been rock-solid w.r.t. stability, and it even has debian packages.
For reasons not yet known, I cannot simultaneously get good performance in
glxgears and fgl_glxgears ("good" here meaning "more than
20 FPS"), but video playback is working, and for now that's
sufficient.
Dynamic CPU scaling works a hell of a lot better on luc than
it ever did on shion. Nice! Related, the battery life looks like
it will be quite sufficient for my needs.
Builtin wired network works. Builtin wireless works (hint: helps to
download the right firmware version). Good enough for me.
I see that I can do lots of neat things with the ThinkPad-specific
features. I have yet to explore most of them, though. Open to suggestions
:)