So, my server had been eating bandwidth for breakfast, and I finally found out why. I was using apache’s mod_proxy to redirect incoming connections across the network, but that was being hijacked by some ad agencies and being used as a general use web proxy. Hopefully I’ve got that taken care of now. While I still see several incoming connections, they are no longer slowing down the network, so I’m assuming that my fix worked.
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.
I’ve installed Ubuntu “Hardy Heron” Alpha 6 on my laptop, and I’ve been using it for the last couple of days. So far, it works rather well, although I’ve had a few issues.
One problem that has finally gone away is the problem connecting to UofL’s network. I can now connect to the wireless network using NetworkManager, though it turns out I may have been able to do so under Gutsy as well.
Firefox 3.0 has been giving me some trouble as well, and I’ve just installed Firefox 2 alongside it in the meantime. Besides not working with Foxmarks, which is a must for me, FF3b3 has been having a number of weird rendering errors.
I love the improvements to Gnome. GVFS is very nice, and makes multiple transfers a lot less cluttered. Supposedly, there’s some stability issues, but I’ve yet to encounter them. The world clock in the calender applet is also very nice, as it lets me monitor the time and weather in multiple cities at a glance. This may be useful next semester if I get a co-op position out of town.
I’ve started a thread over at Ubuntu Forums about this, but I figured I’d make a post here as well. I’m currently looking for an idea for a new Open Source project to start working on, preferably something not too big, but that can still be of value to the community. The thread can be read here, and it’s already got some good ideas in it. A few that stand out, or that are mentioned by multiple people include:
I don’t know which, if any, of these I might wind up working on, but a few of them are spiking my interest. If you have any ideas or suggestions, feel free to email me, or post to the thread.
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
I finally got Eclipse 3.3 working on Ubuntu. After untarring to /opt, I was still experiencing several problems getting Eclipse to run. It turns out that even though I had Sun’s Java installed, /usr/bin/java was still linking to the gcj compiled version. A quick update-alternatives fixed the issue, though.
So, over the last 24 hours, my laptop has gone from Ubuntu, to Fedora, to Arch, back to Fedora, and finally back to Ubuntu. The reason for this is that I was trying to further debug the CPU temperature issues that plague certain Ubuntu users on laptops. In particular, this seems to affect Thinkpad users using an R series notebook. While I wasn’t able to get Fedora to shutdown due to heat, I was able to get the CPU up to about 95 C, which is where Ubuntu usually powers down. However, during normal use, the laptop seemed to run cooler than it had before, and it seemed like the OS was better handling the CPU. I’ve just reinstalled Ubuntu again, as even with the CPU issues, I prefer Ubuntu over any other distro out there, but I’m going to do my best to try and improve the situation. Also, it’s possible that the issue is not purely software related, as most of these reports were on Thinkpad R51 and R52 notebooks, it could be related to the cooling system in them.
Anyways, I’ll post when I have something to report.
There are several ways to run Windows applications under Linux. One of the most common ways is through wine, which redirects system calls to effectively emulate windows programs under Linux. Another popular solution is through virtualization products such as VMWare. In this post, I will describe a method for virtualizing single applications rather than the entire operating system, so you only see the program you’re trying to run rather than the entire OS.
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