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Hibernate on Lenovo 3000 n100

April 13, 2008 Posted by mitch | lenovo, linux, ubuntu | 0 Comments

I've been shutting down and booting my laptop since the day I got it, and to be honest, the one thing I like the most about the mac is its ability to hibernate, and just "be there" when you want to use it, otherwise you can shut the lid and leave it for hours or days without plugging it in. Well, I was up at 3:30 this morning not able to sleep and I thought about it, as I had immediately grabbed the macbook instead of my Lenovo 3000 n100. Even when I was getting up to read more of the online version of the Django book, I knew I wouldn't be doing any actual testing or playing with any django code, unless I installed it on this web server and "tested" it from here. The reason I find it interesting is because I've yet to like to do any form of coding on the Mac, other than the couple times I've played with the new iPhone development tools in XCode. So, I ask myself... why? I find the reason is simply that it was more convenient, I could take the MBP and open it up, launch firefox (3 beta 5 - its awesome!) and be reading in 10-15 seconds. Instead of having to wait for my lenovo to boot. after I had read a couple pages worth of django, it made me curious, because I haven't looked for any information about hibernate for my laptop for a long time. Everything else works (well, that I use anyway, I've yet to test the modem, and I don't much care about the finger print scanner.. that will probably be my next quest or possibly fixing the stupid alsa drivers for the sound) And sure enough, I found an Ubuntu wiki post about my specific laptop, and to get hibernate working all I had to change was add one line to my grub config and reboot. Heres what I changed: from the file /boot/grub/menu.lst # defoptions=quiet splash to this: # defoptions=quiet splash locale=en_US i8042.reset sudo grub-update and reboot. apparently the part that makes it work is the i8042.reset line, not sure what the locale has to do with it, but the poster on the ubuntu wiki had his locale set as well, so I figured it couldn't hurt. Sure enough it works and I updated my power setting to start putting my laptop in hibernate mode when I shut the lid. On that page, it also has the information about fixing the alsa drivers, as well as the much annoying touchpad while typing fixes, which I've also applied. I've yet to experience any issues with random grazes of the touchpad like I used to when I was typing, so I believe it has worked, but it rarely happened at home and was usually while I was at work for some reason so we'll see on that one.

Not switching to MacBook Pro

April 13, 2008 Posted by mitch | apple | 0 Comments

Since getting the MacBook Pro from my boss, I've had some time to play with it. As it turns out, I still only like to use it as much as I like to use my wife's laptop, mostly just for checking email and web browsing. It just seems slower than my Lenovo, even with its faster procs and same amount of ram... to test I got it dual booting Ubuntu, but even that seems slow. All that I could deal with, however, I really don't like the keyboard. Or rather the lack of an insert, and a delete and back space keys. Page Up and Page Down also seem to be missing. These keys I use alot, and they're all very accessible on my Lenovo. So, I've decided, I won't be fully switching from my Lenovo as much as my boss wants me to. The biggest reason so far that I could have used the mac was more for the 1Gb nic it has in it. At work I've had to do some testing of the network and I have some scripts and other applications that can fully maximize the throughput of the network, and my current hardware peaks at 100Mbit so, I didn't see some problems that others in the building were experiencing because of it. I had the choice to buy a laptop with a 1Gb nic in it when I bought this, it would have cost me more, but to be honest, it was a laptop, when would I EVER actually be able to utilize a gigabit nic. Well... saving to or reading from the hard drive its impossible... but reading and writing straight from ram, you can actually get around to filling a gigabit pipe. So, I have a reason to switch, I just don't think I will be. If anything it will give me a reason to buy a new Thinkpad T61 :)

to dual boot my mac or not

April 7, 2008 Posted by mitch | apple, linux, technology | 0 Comments

Well, I've had the macbook pro for a couple weeks now, and while I personally don't have a problem with Mac OS X... its just not Linux. I like mac fine and all... When I'm using it however... I miss my ubuntu laptop. Browsing the web and doing email works just fine on the mac... also I generally would prefer the mac when doing movie stuff, however it was a pita to get xvid working. (it only took me 20 minutes or so, but that was still way to long, my "aptitude install gstreamer-*" works much nicer) And ports on the mac... what a joke, its an even bigger pita. It attempts to be like linux's package managers, however, you have to install all the xcode tools before you can even run those, and that took 45 minutes or so. Over all... the Mac interface is definately nice, thats not my complaint, its just I like my open source tools, and the mac is just to proprietary for me to really work on. So.. I believe I will be repartitioning this mac... or maybe, i'll try out the partition resizer built in... don't really care if I corrupt the data on it... By this time tomorrow hopefully, I'll be abe to dual boot the latest ubuntu 8.04 (yes, i know currently still beta)

Gigabit Ethernet

April 3, 2008 Posted by mitch | technology, work | 0 Comments

I don't talk about work much on my blog, mostly because I don't feel like it is appropriate. However, there are things that I learn while at work that would be appropriate to write about. The purpose of this post is just such a situation. I currently work as a network system consultant and I've been doing work onsite for a company for the last 8 months or so. They move large files around, (they're a printing company) and have also put in a huge investment into gigabit ethernet equipment everywhere. However, most of their buildings are fairly old, and the last time they were cabled was around 1998. Most things are run with your standard Category 5 cable (not even Cat5e). Now the sharp person will know immediately that Cat5 is not supposed to run gigabit. Someone forgot to tell everyone else here, because they put the swithes in place and put gigabit ethernet on the desktops as well... and they negotiated at 1 gigabit.... so it should work right? Wrong! Gigabit ethernet is *very* sensitive to the type of cable being run over it, so much so, that technically you can run it over Cat5e, but if your really shooting for gigabit to the desktop, I wouldn't go less than Cat6 and making sure you do not run the cable closer than 3 feet from florescent light blasts, and keep it the same distance from all power runs as well. We had a situation in one of the buildings, that they've been fighting speed issues for months/years, and in no way did they think it was possible to get faster speeds out of Cat5 cable if I were to drop their speeds to 100Mbit full duplex. Instead of the 1Gbit it was currently negotiating at. Finally we got the ok to force everyone in the building down to 100 Full (actually the switches are HP Procurves, and they have an option to set ports to auto-100 which allows the port to negotiate between full and half duplex and speeds of 10 or 100Mbit, essentially leaving out the option for gigabit). And sure enough speed times increased 3 fold. Imagine that.