Intel has announced the branding for their Nehalem processors. Like many others, I was expecting “Core 3″ but apparently it will be called “Core i7.” What that’s supposed to mean, I have no idea, but I’m still looking forward to it.
Model: Lenovo Thinkpad T61p 6459-CTO
Distro: Ubuntu Linux 8.04 LTS
The following also worked out of the box:
In short, every piece of hardware in the T61p works fine in Linux. Under the latest Ubuntu release, all I had to do after installing was install the nvidia-new driver from the repositories, everything else is supported by default with open source drivers.
After three years of faithful service, my Thinkpad R51 “notapowerbook” will be retired in favor of a new Thinkpad T61p, which I’ve decided to dub “Krayt.” I had some trouble deciding what to name this one, originally thinking of “notamacbookpro” to continue the “nota” naming trend, and then my planned Eee PC I want to get down the road could be “notamacbook.” However, as this is a desktop replacement notebook (and indeed, it’s more powerful than my desktop), I’ve decided to use my existing trend of naming computers after lizards (past computers were Iguana, Chameleon, and Komodo) by naming this one Krayt, after the fictional Krayt Dragons from the Star Wars universe. So, the Eee will wind up being a smaller lizard, maybe “Anole.”
Anyways, the laptop was born and shipped yesterday, on April 20th. The specs are as follows:
Lenovo Thinkpad T61p:
It should arrive at the end of this week, right as I’m finishing finals for the semester.
It will, of course, run Ubuntu 8.04 LTS
The problem with Atheros cards in Hardy seems to have been resolved. I’ve built debs from the bzr branch of NetworkManager, which will become network-manager_0.6.6-0ubuntu2 (0ubuntu1 is the current version), and my wireless internet works again.
So, while the fix is currently unreleased, it should be out soon.
Another development in my ongoing battle against overheating, a post on ubuntuforums suggested adding the following lines to /etc/modules, and doing so has dropped my CPU temperature by about 15 degrees Celsius.
battery
ac
thermal
processor
acpi-cpufreq
cpufreq-userspace
If you know me, you know that I love ridiculously powerful computers. In the process of poking around online, I discovered Intel’s Clovertown CPU. Clovertown is a quad core Xeon based on the Core 2 series of processors. Now, it is a “fake” quad core. That is, it’s two dual cores stuck into a single physical CPU, but it’s still impressive. What suprised me about the Clovertown CPUs was the price. The entry level Clovertown, at 1.6GHz, was only $350. With a quad core processor for that cheap, you can build a pretty exciting system. So, I started to do some research.
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I’ve greatly improved my CPU temperature situation by adding the following two lines to my /etc/rc.local file:
echo -n “90:80:60:75:70:65″ > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/trip_points
echo 2 > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/polling_frequency
Here’s the rc.local file if you want to look at it.
After reading through a slew of comments on a Launchpad bug report, I’m at least a step closer to solving the issue of my CPU temperature overheating.
First off, the bug only seems to happen on Ubuntu. I’m downloading a DVD image of Fedora Core 6 as I type this. I’d hate to move away from Ubuntu, but this bug is very serious, and greatly impacts the usability of my computer.
However, there may be a way to solve this without switching distros. I’ve added the following two lines to /etc/rc.local:
/etc/init.d/powernowd stop
sh -c ‘echo -n ondemand > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor’
Note, those are two lines, even if WordPress wraps the words.
After running those two command manually, my CPU seems to be in much better shape. The CPU still heats up, but as it approaches a dangerous temperature, it clocks down for a few seconds to allow itself to cool off, then clocks back up if needed. This is much better than my previous solution that locked the CPU to 600MHz whenever the temperature passed 90° C.
In no way to I guarantee this solution. It might help, it might make things worse, so don’t blame me if something breaks.
So, this was ironic. I’ve been having trouble with Edgy ever since I installed it. In particular, my CPU will hang and get very hot, eventually causing my computer to automatically shut down. Following a conversation on IRC, I decided to see if a fresh install of Ubuntu would fix my problems. So, I downloaded and burnt an Edgy CD, then installed it. I keep /home on a separate partition, so I didn’t lose anything important. Once I got back into Edgy, I started rebuilding some of the packages that I had custom-built on my previous installation. After the CPU had been runnning at nearly full speed for a couple of hours, I remarked on IRC:
hey, this fresh install seems to have fixed my cpu problems *knock on wood*
I pressed enter. I saw the words appear on my screen. Then the entire screen went black, and I was greeted with:
CPU critical temperature reached (92° C) Shutting down…
So, I guess the moral here is, when you’ve solved a problem, don’t let your computer know you’ve fixed it.
It’s only part-way through the development cycle for Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” but already, some fairly interesting changes are being made. I’m not talking here about the “Big Things” such as the proprietary drivers and codecs issue, or the composite by default specification, but rather the packages that make up Feisty’s repository.
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