On Thursday September 14, 2006 I purchased a used IBM ThinkPad T23 laptop. This blog is for notes about that laptop.
This part of the blog is for the T23 in general and for the Ubuntu 6.10 7.04 distribution I'm running alongside Gentoo. I've set up a separate Gentoo Blog because I really want that material in one place. And now there's a separate Damn Small Linux Blog as well.
I just went ahead and used the graphical update-manager to install Gutsy, and things went fairly well. My xfce issues are all better.
Fri Nov 23 14:55:15 EST 2007
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Ubuntu kernel is still T23-hostile. Won't boot. I'm running the Gentoo
kernel. But xfce seems fine. My ROX-Filer Terminal icon doesn't work.
All the other icons work and I fixed the Terminal icon (name change from
/usr/bin/Terminal to /usr/bin/xfce4-terminal.wrapper).32 packages removed but not purged (I purged manually).For the time being (at least) I've removed mplayer and installed vlc. Until it won't do something I want it to, I'll probably leave it that way. I was able to play a commercial DVD, and I think that's the acid test.
I installed icewm as an alternative to xfce, and the current version of opera. It sometimes comes in handy. I should probably install it in the Gentoo partition as well.
I followed instructions from the esmtp online manual to get esmtp and gmail working nicely, but for some reason the commands I used don't show up in .bash_history. They were cut'n'pasted from the web page. Is that why?
mkdir ~/.authenticate
chmod 0700 ~/.authenticate
wget https://www.verisign.com/support/thawte-roots.zip
unzip -p thawte-roots.zip 'Thawte Server Roots/ThawtePremiumServerCA_b64.txt' > ~/.authenticate/ca.pem
chmod 0600 ~/.authenticate/ca.pem
rm thawte-roots.zip
Sat Nov 24 09:56:26 EST 2007
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drwx------ 2 pann pann 4096 2007-11-24 07:23 .authenticate/
-rw------- 1 pann pann 1174 2007-11-24 07:23 ca.pemI did an update today in the office, after which I seem to be unable to see anything under X. gdm lets me login, but then I get a blank blue screen and can't seem to do anything about it.
For what it's worth, there were three backport packages updated before this happened, systat, isag, and mplayer. systat had to do a fair amount of mucking about to get itself installed.
I'll see what I can recover from /home/pann just in case the solution is a clean Gutsy Gibbon install. Then I'll boot Feisty and see if I can do any magic with dpkg-reconfigure.
I upgraded namib at the office from Feisty to Gutsy yesterday using the GUI tool. Alt-F2, then
package-manager -cWent well. Don't walk away, however. There are a few points where the upgrade will stop waiting on user input. And you need to turn off the screensaver (or at least locking) before starting the upgrade. At one point I couldn't get back in on the GUI screen, because the screensaver lock refused my password. I had to log in on a virtual console and kill the screensaver.
Perhaps I'll find time to do the T23 over the weekend.
The long (Thanksgiving) weekend is more likely. I did a clean install of Gutsy on my desktop at home this weekend, but have done no tuning of it so far.
I seem to have lost track of which battery is which. I need to get them both charged tonight and make sure I start my morning commute tomorrow with the primary battery.
OK, I got the batteries charged and sorted, not that there's that much difference at this point.
20071115204244 x-u charging 19240 19350 38880 Panasonic-IBM-02K6620:2432 99%
20071116054509 x-u charged 17300 17320 43200 SANYO-IBM-02K7028:2974 99%
20071116062322 x-u discharging 18960 19350 38880 Panasonic-IBM-02K6620:2432 97%I started the trip home with 29% on the battery, and when it got down to 4% (under Xubuntu) I rebooted into Damn Small Linux. DSL came up and told me I have about three minutes remaining. We shall see. I certainly have more time than that before this commute is over.
My days of two full commutes on one battery charge seem to be over as this battery ages. It still takes more of a charge than the battery that came with the T23 when I bought it, but much less of a charge than when I bought it as a replacement battery.
No worries, though. With judicious use of DSL and the two batteries, I still manage fine, if somewhat less conveniently.
And DSL is coming through as expected. At the moment I've got nearly ten minutes of uptime and the battery meter is showing me five minutes remaining.
Hmmm. I just opened a second tab on Firefox and opened my Cycling Blog. That hammered the battery a bit and now I'm down to less than two minutes and the T23 is honking at me.
I guess discretion is the better part of valor. I've less than one minute left so I'll just shut down.
I've been getting double-beeps while running (and charging) the T23 at my office. I thought I had it narrowed down to a poor connection on the AC side of the charger, but today I couldn't make it go away. I shut down the T23 and then the beeping stopped and the battery did charge. I wonder if it would have run OK on the AC adapter after the battery was charged? Further investigation is indicated.
The office AC adapter charges the battery if the T23 is off, and runs the T23 fine if the battery is charged. It seems to have a problem running the T23 and charging a depleted battery at the same time.
I've installed Text::Textile from the tarball (couldn't find it using the GUI package manager). Let's see if I can make the blog now. Yes, I can.
It seems like it doesn't ever take me very long to find issues with any Linux distro that is targeted at newbies. In this case, gvim throws a bunch of warnings on startup.
At first glance it appears to be related to the Clearlooks theme. The console is reporting an number of .gtkrc errors.
There is also an untitled dialog box showing a number of errors like this:
Adding client to server's list failed, CORBA error: IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0Changing the theme to KDE Classic made the desktop less appealing, but had no impact on the gvim errors.
One other thing, Konqueror renders my blog pages much more nicely than does Firefox, at least as Firefox is currently configured.
/usr/local/binI clearly need to create a /working/bin subdirectory and put the shared executables in there and create symbolic links to them in the various /usr/local/bin subdirecories.
Along those same lines, I should create /working/.config and put configuration files in there that could be shared, things like .vimrc and .mutt_aliases.
Hmmm, it turns out .vimrc is not a good candidate. But the idea is sound, I believe. We'll see how it works out in practice.
I'm editing this entry in my current Sandbox distribution. I can't run make, however, because I'm missing Text::Textile. I'm not interested in fooling around with symbolic linking. I'll just wait and install the modules I need when I have an Internet connection (I'm on the train at the moment).
Here are my installation notes:
-rw-r--r-- 1 500 500 1120 Sep 26 18:51 /mnt/hda2/tmp/pclinuxosChris Doucet gave me a live CD and I've booted it on my T23.
VIM - Vi IMproved 7.0 (2006 May 7, compiled Nov 1 2006 17:46:22)
Included patches: 1-30Seems to be a Debian Mandriva-based system and the default desktop is KDE.
2.6.18.8.tex5OK, so I double-clicked the Install PCLinuxOS icon on the desktop, after quickly browsing /usr/share/doc/HTML/Install.html which opens when you double-click the Installation Help icon on the desktop.
I answered the questions sensibly and files are being copied from the CD to the Sandbox partition on my hard drive as I type. I hope the copy completes before the battery gives up the ghost.
[guest@localhost guest]$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 120M 2.5M 118M 3% /
/dev/hda2 7.6G 4.3G 3.0G 60% /mnt/hda2
/dev/hda7 9.5G 1.9G 7.2G 21% /mnt/install
[guest@localhost guest]$ /mnt/hda2/usr/local/bin/checkbattery.sh
20070926185021 discharging 9970 23250 38880 Panasonic-IBM-02K6620:2432 42%
[guest@localhost guest]$ date
Wed Sep 26 18:50:28 EDT 2007Looks like I'm gonna make it!
Thu Sep 27 06:47:32 EDT 2007
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Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda7 9.5G 2.0G 7.0G 23% /I booted Damn Small Linux and fixed up grub.conf on the Gentoo partition. The PCLinuxOS installer gave me no choice about where to install grub, so it wiped out my configuration. All better now.
One thing that I noticed during this exercise is that PCLOS saves some restore data in the swap partition when shutting down. Can't help but wonder what impact this has on a multiboot system. Or what data is saved. Or if it can be configured to save the data on a normal filesystem partition.
Clearly a Debian-based system. Not so fast, we have apt-get and the synaptic package manager, but neither dpkg nor aptitude seems to be installed! OK, now it looks to me like it's a Mandriva-based system using apt for rpm.
KDE desktop and what seems to be a reasonable application set. It is missing some documentation however. Hopefully there will be a kde-docs package or something like that I can apt-get to remedy that situation.
For whatever reason, this distro seems to be harder on the battery than Gentoo or Ubuntu. I'm down to 45% at the end of the commute and that seems pretty low.
Unless there is a disaster today I'll consider this drive working and leave positive feedback for the seller tonight (or maybe Tuesday, given my plans for the weekend).
I'm currently running Ubuntu and I've rsync'd everything except the root partition for this distribution. I'll boot Gentoo into single user mode and do that while I'm having breakfast. As soon as I get to work I'll swap the drives (T23 internal and Ultrabay).
I've got a new kernel to try out (linux-2.6.22-gentoo-r5), but I'll wait until after the drive swap to do that.
Installed the "new" drive when I got to my office and ran Gentoo all day with no issues.
I'm now running on linux-2.6.22-gentoo-r5 under both Gentoo and Ubuntu. Took a fair amount of fiddling with /etc/fstab under Ubuntu to get the UUIDs right owing to my fumbling fingers. If I knew I was going to be swapping hard drives often I'd write a script to protect me from myself. Slow day, I wrote the script.
I'll wait a couple days before yarding out linux-2.6.22-gentoo-r2.
The replacement drive arrived, a 5400rpm 40G Fujitsu, and I imaged it yesterday. Unlike the previous two drives I've received from this seller (one good, one bad), this one had no partition table when I first fired it up.
I'll try to find time to actually install it when I get to work this morning.
That didn't happen. Tonight? Early tomorrow morning?
The train took a long pause outside Jamaica Station. The T23 just beeped at me about the battery. checkbattery.sh shows 10% and conky tells me ~13 minutes. I may not make it all the way to Albertson today, even though I'm running DSL for my evening commute.
No big deal. I seem to have run out of things to write about anyway.
Well, the "new" drive worked fine for about four hours after I got to work, then it stopped. Neither read nor write access was possible, and an attempted reboot failed.
I replaced the drive with the Fujitsu drive I've been using and emailed the seller. He's sending a replacement. I'll want to take a closer look at his email.
I'm hopeful that I'll be able to get access to the fried drive in the UltraBay, at least for a few minutes. I don't think I did anything important today that would be written only to that drive, but there may be a couple of emails in my outbox worth recovering. Or maybe not, I really don't remember.
OK, the partition is copied. I also created the vfat filesystem on /dev/hdc1 (Gentoo doesn't seem to have mkfs.vfat). When I get to work I'll install the drive in the T23, put the CD in the UltraBay, boot Damn Small Linux and install GRUB on the boot sector. Then I'll boot the "new" drive and leave positive feedback on ebay.
The second 40G drive I won on ebay arrived and I've got it in the UltraBay. At home I copied all the partitions except /dev/hda2 (which is the Gentoo / partition) to /dev/hdc. This morning I booted into Ubuntu and am copying over /dev/hda2 as I type.
The drive in the UltraBay is a 4200rpm drive and the drive currently installed in the T23 is a 5400rpm drive. It certainly seems to be faster than the 4200rpm 20G drive it replaced. I think I'm going to install the 4200rpm 40G drive in the T23 and reserve the 5400rpm drive for the iBook. That's with the idea that the iBook will become my primary laptop. Of course, I have no idea yet how that's going to work out.
I got Gentoo up to date today. An interesting thing was the number of reverse dpendencies that got rebuilt when I ran revdep-rebuild. Everything seems to be fine.
Late in the day I booted into Xubuntu because I got a security update email for xfce-terminal today. Xubuntu is up to date and I'm running it on this commute. I had nearly 60% battery so I should be able to make it home without issue (I typically run Damn Small Linux if I'm worried about remaining battery capacity).
Well, I got Xubuntu up to date, but there were some oopses with updating Gentoo. I updated everything except a few X11 and Gnome packages. Looks like something is broken in the portage tree. I'll try again tomorrow. I'm not supposed to emerge --sync more than once a day, so even if whatever's broken has already been fixed I'll just politely wait until tomorrow. OTOH, it may be several days before I can do a clean emerge world and emerge -auDN world.
I'm using DSL on this commute, and all seems to be fine. I incrementally make changes in /mnt/hda5/working so that the dsl user can do what he needs to do without resorting to sudo, and without breaking anything under Gentoo or Xubuntu.
I just got a warning beep from the T23. The battery monitor is showing ~40min uptime and ~12min left. checkbattery.sh says 9%. I think it's about 10min to Albertson, so I should be fine.
It's 6:53pm and we're creeping through Mineola. I presume that once we're clear of Mineola we'll start honkin' on. I've still got nearly 8min left according to the battery monitor, and from past experience that means I've actually got more time than that. So, plenty of time to get to Albertson and then shut down during the transit between Albertson and Roslyn.
East Williston and 4% equals 6min 21s. I'll be fine.
The hard drive transplant seems to be been a success. I've booted into and used both Gentoo and Xubuntu copied from the flaky 30G drive, as well as Damn Small Linux (which I actually upgraded from 3.3. to 3.4 along the way). Everything seems to work as expected.
As a bonus, not only is the new drive about twice the size of the original, it appears to be faster.
When I get to the office I'll make sure both Gentoo and Xubuntu are current.
This morning I booted the T23 with the 30G drive in the UltraBay and was able to access it.
I backed up everything important to my USB external hard drive. I also created a /working clone under /mnt/Vector on hda, so I'm good to go on the original 20G drive until one of the 40G drives I won on ebay arrives.
The basic plan will be to partition the 40G drive like I did the 30G drive, except increasing the 6G partitions to 8G and letting the last partition (/mnt/Sandbox) be whatever size fills out the drive. Then I'll copy the hda3 Gentoo installation from the external USB drive to hdc7, fix up /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/grub.conf, run grub to make it bootable, and shut down.
After installing the 40G drive I'll boot to "old Gentoo" in hda7 (which will eventually become /mnt/Sandbox). Once I've successfully done that I'll try once again to access the 30G drive in the UltraBay and, if successful, image copy the Gentoo, Ubuntu, and /working partitions to the "new" 40G drive.
Friday update: I've booted "old Gentoo" as hdc7 so it should be fine as hda7 with a tiny change to /etc/fstab. I guess the drill will be to install the 40G drive and then put the CD in the UltraBay, boot DSL from CD and run grub to make the new drive bootable, then reboot.
This should work under DSL:
$ sudo grub --no-floppy
grub> root (hd0,6)
grub> setup (hd0)I believe both /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/grub.conf are ready to go.
Well, after running on hdc all day at the office, the T23 refused to boot with the 30G drive in the UltraBay. It may finally be completely dead. I hope not, there's some stuff on there I'd like to recover, including several recent blog entries. This entry is here only temporarily, assuming I can recover what's on the sick drive.
I'm running DSL for my evening commute so I should have plenty of battery, even if the train is delayed (as it seems to be). Ah, here we go, leaving Penn Station only five minutes late.
Looks like I preserved the rav4, cars, and outbox mailboxes. Also a fairly recent copy of newcars.tmp. Ha! It just occurred to me, all my recent blog entries are saved to blog.ourmanpann.com (except settle).
OK, so what do I need to slurp off the sick drive, assuming I can get it to turn back on for a little while?
/working/ (I should check and see what's backed up to panda)/mnt/Ubuntu/home/pann/ (after Jul 13?)/mnt/Ubuntu/home/pann/Mail (after Jun 14?)/mnt/Ubuntu/home/pann/SC (after Jul 12?)/mnt/Gentoo/home/pann/ (after Jul 13?)/mnt/Gentoo/home/pann/Mail (after Jun 14?)/mnt/Gentoo/home/pann/SC (after Jul 12?)I booted hdc Xubuntu for my morning commute and again for my evening commute. At work I ran hdc Gentoo. No issues so far.
It turns out that both 40G drives from ebay, a Fujitsu and a Hitachi, are coming from the same vendor. I still have to return the dead one from the last auction.
With luck I'll end up with functional 40G drives in both the T23 and the iBook.
I won (and received) a 40G laptop HD on ebay, but it was defective. Advertised as new, it was not only not new (WinXP installation dating to 2004 on the drive) it was bad (threw a boatload of read errors). The seller is taking it back and has promised a full refund.
I won another 40G drive today (two more, actually), so let's hope that works out better.
So far, the (30G) HD that failed has been running fine in the UltraBay, and the original (20G) drive is doing fine back in the primary drive slot. In fact, I've booted to Xubuntu on the 30G drive for this commute. I will admit that I've never tried to duplicate the conditions that seemed to precipitate the failure: running Xubuntu with the wireless card for several hours on the AC adapter. I suppose I should try it on both the primary and UltraBay Xubuntu partitions and see if anything bad happens.
While I was at work today I booted both Gentoo and Xubuntu on /dev/hdc and brought both distributions up to date.