About laptop PC, I have always been conveiced that the best pieces of hardware are found among Sony and Lenovo (ex-IBM). In tough or ultra-light categories, I would add Panasonic, but it is not the kind of laptop I am looking for.

So this time I am giving a try to Lenovo. What really decided me is its old fashion screen, I mean a non-bright one. My eyes are really getting tired with all these new bright laptop screens. Plus, its resolution is impressive : 1440 x 900.

So far I am pretty satisfied. For my need, the 14.1″ screen is the best compromise, and so is the weight and size of the laptop.

Without surprise, the keyboard and the trackpoint are just excellent. I also aprreciate some features like the hardware encryption of the hard drive, which also benefits from the active protection (head parking in case of shock to protect the data).

The laptop built and design are not as nice and polished as the Sony ones, but it is certainly solid.

After I took it just out of the box, I thought I would give a look to the pre-installed Windows Vista system. But the first startup appeared to be so long that I quickly stopped it in the middle of its process, inserted a fresh Debian Lenny 64 bits CD and went for a set up.

I worked pretty well out of the box. Like usual, I had to download the Intel Wifi firmware and the proprietary nvidia driver to use all the features of my Quadro NVS 140M graphic card.

More annoying, the active protection is not supported by default by the kernel.

I also have a problem with hibernation. Suspend to RAM works well, but resuming after suspend to disk always leave me on a blank screen. I guess this is related to the graphic driver, but so far the workaround that I found from other users don’t work for me.

Other things, including the fingerprint reader, work pretty well.

There are a number of guides from the ThinkWiki website that helped me a lot. Among them :

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installing_Debian_Lenny_on_a_ThinkPad_T61

Set up the active protection (patch and recompile the kernel :( ) :

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Installing_Debian_Lenny_on_a_ThinkPad_T60#hdapsd

Get the fingerprint reader work :

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ThinkFinger

However, after a few days, I realized that I was not satisfied by the responsiveness of the laptop, and especially the way it managed multiprocessing. I also wanted to use the active protection for my hard drive.

I decided to compile my own kernel, more optimized than the generic AMD 64 one provided by Debian.

Here is an excerpt from my .config file activating some features for a Core 2 Duo Intel processor – this apply to the latest version of Linux today, 2.6.24-2 :

#
# Processor type and features
#
CONFIG_TICK_ONESHOT=y
CONFIG_NO_HZ=y
CONFIG_HIGH_RES_TIMERS=y
CONFIG_GENERIC_CLOCKEVENTS_BUILD=y
CONFIG_SMP=y
CONFIG_X86_PC=y
CONFIG_MCORE2=y
CONFIG_X86_L1_CACHE_BYTES=64
CONFIG_X86_INTERNODE_CACHE_BYTES=64
CONFIG_X86_CMPXCHG=y
CONFIG_X86_L1_CACHE_SHIFT=6
CONFIG_X86_GOOD_APIC=y
CONFIG_X86_INTEL_USERCOPY=y
CONFIG_X86_USE_PPRO_CHECKSUM=y
CONFIG_X86_TSC=y
CONFIG_X86_MINIMUM_CPU_FAMILY=64
CONFIG_HPET_TIMER=y
CONFIG_HPET_EMULATE_RTC=y
CONFIG_GART_IOMMU=y
CONFIG_CALGARY_IOMMU=y
CONFIG_CALGARY_IOMMU_ENABLED_BY_DEFAULT=y
CONFIG_SWIOTLB=y
CONFIG_NR_CPUS=8
CONFIG_SCHED_SMT=y
CONFIG_SCHED_MC=y
CONFIG_PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY=y
CONFIG_PREEMPT_BKL=y
CONFIG_X86_LOCAL_APIC=y
CONFIG_X86_IO_APIC=y
CONFIG_X86_MCE=y
CONFIG_X86_MCE_INTEL=y
CONFIG_X86_MCE_AMD=y
CONFIG_MICROCODE=m
CONFIG_MICROCODE_OLD_INTERFACE=y
CONFIG_X86_MSR=m
CONFIG_X86_CPUID=m
CONFIG_NUMA=y
CONFIG_K8_NUMA=y
CONFIG_X86_64_ACPI_NUMA=y
CONFIG_NODES_SHIFT=6
CONFIG_ARCH_DISCONTIGMEM_ENABLE=y
CONFIG_ARCH_DISCONTIGMEM_DEFAULT=y
CONFIG_ARCH_SPARSEMEM_ENABLE=y
CONFIG_SELECT_MEMORY_MODEL=y
CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM_MANUAL=y
CONFIG_DISCONTIGMEM=y
CONFIG_FLAT_NODE_MEM_MAP=y
CONFIG_NEED_MULTIPLE_NODES=y
CONFIG_SPARSEMEM_VMEMMAP_ENABLE=y
CONFIG_SPLIT_PTLOCK_CPUS=4
CONFIG_MIGRATION=y
CONFIG_RESOURCES_64BIT=y
CONFIG_ZONE_DMA_FLAG=1
CONFIG_BOUNCE=y
CONFIG_VIRT_TO_BUS=y
CONFIG_MTRR=y
CONFIG_SECCOMP=y
CONFIG_CC_STACKPROTECTOR=y
CONFIG_HZ_1000=y
CONFIG_HZ=1000
CONFIG_KEXEC=y
CONFIG_PHYSICAL_START=0x200000
CONFIG_PHYSICAL_ALIGN=0x200000
CONFIG_HOTPLUG_CPU=y
CONFIG_ARCH_ENABLE_MEMORY_HOTPLUG=y
CONFIG_HAVE_ARCH_EARLY_PFN_TO_NID=y
CONFIG_OUT_OF_LINE_PFN_TO_PAGE=y

The important differences with the standard kernel are :

• the timer frequency set to “1000 Hz”,
• processor familly to “Core 2”
• preemption model to “Voluntary”

I am seeing now better performance in threading and global responsiveness – including, believe it or not, with the compiz effect, what I didn’t expect at all.

At the end, I just have hibernation not working : it is nice to see how good the support of Debian Lenny is, thought the hardware is pretty recent. Things are really improving quickly.

If you have some issue installing Linux on your Thinpad, post your problem here. I will be happy to help you as much as I can.

But my need overpassed my fears.

I found one rather cheap on this website. I mean much cheaper than the one from Sony, which was around 300 € !!! And this is always very expensive whatever the brand is.
At this price, it is better to buy a new laptop (maybe that’s what they aim).

I chose the one with a bigger power and payed with paypal. Surprisingly, I received it quickly, just two days after my purchase.

Concerning the quality of this battery, so far, I am very happy. Over my expectations. The design exactly look like the Sony one. I guess it just come out from the same factory but doesn’t have the Sony stick…

This new battery has 7200 mAh and offers me about 4h30 of work on battery ! To be compared with the 2h30 I had with the original one (and only 1h more recently).

So, don’t be affraid anymore to buy no-name replacement batteries !
I will definitely so in the future, when I need.

Mine was a terrible 4200 rpm Hitachi disk (Travelstar 4K120). Just terrible. My old desktop was often faster just thanks to its 7200 rpm disks.

Morever, I was not trustful anymore in its reliability. It produces an infamous click noise every time the head moves. Infamous, because there are many posts about that on many forums, concerning any laptop brand. It is not the kind of click when a disk dies, as it always did it. I have no evidence of that, but I am pretty sure it is the same model in all cases. It must be a common disk on cheap laptops. Anyway, for me no trick worked to kill this noise : on forums, laptop-mode tool was sometimes accused, and other times the ACPI setting of hdparm.

I looked for a Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 – 100 (~ 130 €). Why this brand ? I am used to it, I have been always buying this brand since they took over IBM and was never disapointed by their speed, their silence and their reliability.

Its main features are the 7200 rpm, a cache of 8 Mb, 10 ms access time and a maximum power consumption of 5,5 W (2 W for reading/writing and 0.5 W idle).

After having used it several days now, I have to say that I am extrimely satisfied.
It is not noisy at all despite its 7200 rpm. It is actually more silent than the 4200 and, very important, the click noise definitely dispeared !!!
About speed, the difference is big too. I don’t want to do a full benchmark here, but every program launches faster and all the system runs smoothly.
As an exemple, my Ubuntu starts in less than 30 s where it took 50 s before (from the BIOS to a fully operational Gnome).
One point I was worried about was its power consumption and its impact on the autonomy of the laptop. Normaly, a 7200 rpm needs more power than a 4200 one. I have been totally relieved now since I don’t see any change.
I was not expecting the last point : temperature. The 4K120 was rather hot : 42°C on normal charge, 50°C on full charge. The 7K100 impresses me : 33°C on normal charge, 39°C on full charge ! As good as the desktop models ! It is not only safer for the data, but it benefits to the whole laptop.

Finally, I recycled the old disk in a USB box. This one, Advance BX-2520, is very cheap (~ 12 €), small and does what it is done for very well.

To transfer the data, I first set up the new disk in the Advance usb box.
I copied the first partition (sda1 is mounted as /) :

$ sudo dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/dev/sda1

Then I resized sda1 to fit my new needs, made up the swap partition and the /home one with Gparted.
I just transfered my /home with a simple cp.
The issue I had was concerning the new way that Ubuntu Edgy addresses partitions (UUID instead of /dev/hdx) :

$ sudo vol_id -u /dev/hda2

or

ls -la /dev/disk/by-uuid/

The output looks like it :

087b3a57-6703-42eb-99d3-278d01618336

It gives you, for instance, the UUID of the swap partition.
I updated my fstab :

UUID=087b3a57-6703-42eb-99d3-278d01618336  none            swap    sw              0       0

Repeat this for all the partitions.
Concerning the swap, to keep the hibernation working, you have to edit /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume.
The line it contains must be :

RESUME=UUID=087b3a57-6703-42eb-99d3-278d01618336

Finally, to generate a new initramfs image, do :

$  sudo update-initramfs -u -k $(uname -r)

Well, I was expecting quite a lot from this upgrade. I am using an Ubuntu 6.10 OS and having a dozen of applications running at the same time : Firefox, Liferea, Evolution, Open Office, Skype, Gaim, Beagle, plus a dozen of applets (Tomboy, Mail Notification, Deskbar, etc), small programs or other accessories.

You may guess how swappy it was. And having a 4200 rpm hard drive doesn’t really help.

I became almost crazy every time I had to use VMWare to run a Windows XP. The great memory management of Linux made it possible where it would have been unthinkable on a windows host, but it was still a painful exercise every time I had to get in and out of the WMWare guest.

I have even been thinking of buying a new laptop. But I decided it was not the time for that :

1. I use little CPU in my daily work and even the celeron processor of my Sony VGN-FS215E laptop is not much used. It is not time for me yet to get a core duo.
2. A new laptop is expensive and mine is still quite recent.
3. There are going to be new technologies soon, which could be very interesting for the laptops : new kind of batteries and hard drives with built-in flash memory (to speed-up and save power).

So I finally decided to change the two 256 Mb modules for 512 Mb ones (because of dual transport). Hmm it was expensive so I didn’t want to get disappointed…

And now this is great ! It is much over what I expected. The system is now running smoothly, even with a virtual host running. The terrible hard drive is less often in use and that makes all the difference.

Yes, 1 Gb has been the standard for a while and it was time for me to get it ! I feel much more relaxed while I am working. Now, I plan soon to change my hard drive for a 7200 Rpm Hitachi one. No doubt it will be smoother and give me better startup performances.

My plan is now to enjoy my Vaio one more year. Do most of people need a core duo processor on their laptop ? I don’t think so, but many people may think they need when their computer is swapping… cunning marketing !