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Monday, February 18, 2008

Ubuntu 7.10 on a Thinkpad X61

Installation went smoothly. The install quietly but firmly apportioned part of the disk to Ubuntu while Vista was asleep. Vista took the hump about the reduction in its disk space when it woke up. It went skulking into the corner doing a chkdsk or something. Anyway, it all "just worked".

By "all" I mean the usual "all". I.e. all the stuff you really, really need like networking and e-mail and all that.

Some tweaking has been ongoing - especially to enable the pen stuff. So far nothing major to report.

Compiz fusion doesn't like the graphics card but its possible to tell it to fly dangerously and then its mostly fine. Useful for moments of Mac envy.

On the "bummer" side, emacs has some stability issues related to Gnome by the looks of it. Xemacs to the rescue there.

Pidgin occasionally has a hissy fit so I'm trying Kopete.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hope you enjoy your new toy.

You may find this article interesting about Ubuntu and disk drives.

Apparently disk head parking can be fatal (after a while anyway).

ubuntu is killing your laptop

Jon Dowland said...

I'd suggest skipping straight to the bottom of that article and reading the "Update: turns out this is all a bunch of hokey", or alternatively, don't bother reading it at all.

Anonymous said...

Something to know about that article, Ubuntu doesn't change the power settings of the drive, it just defaults to the drives default. So if your drive says fall asleep every 2 seconds, it will fall asleep every 2 seconds. The problem is with the drive manufacturer. Knowing this now, its probably best that Ubuntu uses a sensible default rather than relying on the manufacturers settings.

On the NTFS resize issue, I believe its a known issue with Vista partition resizing in general with ntfsresize. I'm not sure if this problem has been tackled yet or not.