My boss decided I should have a company purchased laptop, instead of using my own. Since we had another guy starting at the same time, he wanted us to purchase one for each of us. I went with another Lenovo, but this time a ThinkPad. A ThinkPad T61 with a Core2 duo 2.5Ghz, 4GB RAM, and the WSXGA+ screen, and 250GB drive. I went with the 15" one just for the screen res. I also ordered it preloaded with SuSE. It was $200 cheaper than the one with windows, and I just wanted to add to the tally of the demand for Linux Pre-Loaded. I will be reloading it with Ubuntu once I get it, but not a big deal.
The great news is that it was saying it wasn't going to ship until the 16th of June, well I just got an email saying it shipped today! I ordered 2 Business day shipping which is what I did for my last lenovo, and it came from Hong Kong in 2 days. So, I should have it by thursday, or friday at the latest.
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.
