Laptop Tails

I was sit­ting cross legged on the floor of the lounge room, typ­ing a blog post, when a four month old bor­der col­lie puppy came run­ning around the chair I was using as a back rest, and leapt over my legs. The Power­Book screen took the full impact of a 12kg (26lb) puppy at speed. A resound­ing crack, the Power­Book slide along the floor and the puppy con­tin­ued on her way.

The puppy and the LCD sur­vived without any dam­age, the same could not be said for the hinges. They are not designed for angles exceed­ing 180 degrees. At first I thought is was the hinge I repair every few months and is an abso­lute mess. Unfor­tu­nately it was the other hinge, which had never given me trouble.

I used copi­ous quant­it­ies of super glue spe­cially designed to glue metal, unsu­cess­fully twice. Before resort­ing to the tried and tested expoy resin glue to reat­tach the hinge. Then the fun star­ted, the first couple of times I star­ted the power­book up it a long time to start up wait­ing for disk. Using the disk util­ity did not help and then it refused to boot at all. After try­ing to decode the obtuse error mes­sages, I replaced the hard drive and rein­stalled OsX. Even that was a little adven­ture, as my optical drive decided to play up. I have the Power­Book run­ning but with little over a week to go to WD06, I did not want to drag a laptop that was really show­ing it’s age and abuse halfway round the country.

For­tu­nately a couple of weeks earlier, at work we loc­ated a Dell Lat­ti­tude C840 laptop that had been declared uneco­nomic to repair due to a dead net­work port. With a PCIMA net­work card and a Ubuntu disk I am now using the “work” laptop. The Dell is a little younger than the Power­Book, less used and def­in­itely less abused, other fea­tures are a 1600x1200 screen (now I really see the advant­ages of my fluid elastic design) and close to 5 hours bat­tery life (given the choice between using a floppy drive or a second bat­tery, I chose the extra bat­tery). The down­sides are the weight, about twice that of my old Power­Book and enough to send my legs to sleep if it is on my lap for more than 30 minutes (the bus trip to work) and only 256Mb RAM.

The Ubuntu install went smoothly, it recog­nised all the hard­ware includ­ing the net­work and wire­less cards without any prob­lems. The only tweak­ing was get­ting the sleep and hibern­ate set­tings right. At the moment put­ting the laptop to sleep causes prob­lems with the dis­play, so I just changed the set­tings so the com­puter hibern­ates instead of sleeps.

Addi­tional soft­ware was installed fairly smoothly, Apache, PHP, MySQL, post­gresSQL and a few other via Syn­aptic pack­age man­ager. The enter­tain­ment applic­a­tions were installed via Auto­matix, while I will swear by Rhytym­box as an audio player, VLC for video and some other applic­a­tions includ­ing (Blue­fish and Opera) installed by Auto­matix, it is still a beta app, with a few rough edges and some odd beha­viours. It did not install a couple of apps I asked for and since Auto­matix installed some plu­gins, Fire­fox has become unstable. Still Auto­matix is a very use­ful tool, that saved me alot of time and head­aches. And I have Kon­queror and Opera to use as web browsers.

Over­all I am happy with Ubuntu, the laptop will be trav­el­ling with me to Sydney and will do the job for me until the new Mac­books with the new dual core tech­no­logy arrive (hope­fully mid Octo­ber but that is wish­ful think­ing). Even then I expect it to run Tiger, XP and Ubuntu for me.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 21st, 2006 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Just geek . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.