Thinkpad X61
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I got my second notebook, Thinkpad X61, a few days ago. With a 12.1 inch screen and no CDROM attached it weighs only 2.2 lbs, which is great for traveling. I chose it because I was really not happy with the weight of my old HP notebook: 7.25 lbs without battery. Before I made the oder I also looked into most popular 9 inch netbooks, such as Asus EEE PC, Acer Aspire One, and Dell E netbook. But they all have some unsolved performance issues with their ATOM cpus and onboard hard drives. I didn't go for Mac Air as well because a notebook that expensive means the same as robbery to me and it also restricts the fun you can find from trying all kinds of software.
As my Thinkpad X61 arrived I found everything to be great except the notorious Windows Vista operating system. My dislike of Vista is not lone but shared by all my friends, by news reports, and even by Bill Gates. So my immediate decision was to reinstall the operating system from scratch for the new notebook. This blog then records all the steps I took for that purpose, most of which were dug out deep from the internet using Google.
I have to mention that Thinkpad X61 has an over-heating issue with its wifi card under the right palm. The issue is most severe with Linux because the system just can't manage the wifi card that well. It is even worse on my notebook since the madwifi wireless driver doesn't have support for power management for the Atheros chip. But the issue is not obvious under Windows XP and becomes zilch after turning off the wifi card in the BIOS.
MACHINE: Thinkpad X61 7675CTO
(Intel Core2 Duo CPU T8100 @ 2.1GHz x 2, 2G RAM, 100G 7200RPM Hard Drive)
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Dual-Boot Systems
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The reinstallation was then planned for a dual-boot system with Windows XP Professional and 64-bit Ubuntu Hardy Heron. The Windows system was setup first and the Ubuntu second. The original hard drive partition and the unseen Windows vista recovery partition were all deleted at installing the Windows system. About 85 GB hard drive space was allocated to the Windows system and was divided into three NTFS primary partitions of 25 GB, 30GB, and 30GB, respectively. The remaining 15 GB was late formatted as a 12 GB ext3 root system and a 2 GB swap space for the Linux system. This allocation seemed too stingy for the Linux system, but I didn't realize this after completed all the work and tried out the new systems for a couple of days. Now I have learned that at least 30 GB hard drive space is necessary for carrying out some basic computational work on the Linux system. What a pity!
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
WINDOWS SYSTEM: Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP3
LINUX SYSTEM: Ubuntu 8.04.1 Hardy Heron
(Kernel 2.6.24-19-generic, Gnome 2.22.3, I386x64)
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Windows XP Setup
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Ubuntu Hardy Setup
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# powertop:
1. echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs
2. sysfutils->ships sysfs.conf which allows to conveniently set sysfs attributes change
cpu frequency scaling to ondemand
# wlan power management:
no power management on madwifi driver for atheros
# chinese
1. language support -> chinese
2. scim setup
# Wpa2
1. /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
2. not done
# LaTex
1. texlive
2. texmaker
# Terminal
1. devils pie
2. setup
# intel compilers
0. fix errors when you try an initial install
1. cce
2. fce
3. mkl
# wireless
remove network-manager
install wicd
remove wicd
intall network-manager
wireless not working
install latest madwifi by replacing its ath_hal with latest hal from people.freebsd.org/~sam
restart and stop wireless roaming
start wireless roaming and works.
# syslog-ng
replace klogd and sysklogd
send network-manager messages to /dev/null with permission change.
# hug log files
solved by deleting network profiles for wpa2
