Bit-Shift.Net - September, 2009

Ubuntu and Windows 7 playing on my new T500

After almost 9 years, I finally bought a new laptop as a birthday present to myself. I tried making due with an Asus Eee PC netbook, and while it was light weight and had great battery life, I kept finding myself wanting to see more on the screen.

When I friend told me about a deal with Lenovo to get employee pricing through Borders Rewards. I hopped on Lenovo's site and configured a Thinkpad T500 for myself. At my last company, all engineers were issued Thinkpads and I was really impressed with their design, quality and features. Since I was more interested in long battery life versus high end performance, I chose the 2.26GHz Centrino2, 4GB of RAM, integrated graphics and the 9-cell battery. Even with the 15.4” screen I can get upwards of 6 hours of use.

Once home, I formatted the drive and proceeded to install the 64-bit versions of Ubuntu 9.04 and Windows 7. I use Ubuntu as my main day to day use OS. It has all the utilities I need and use on a daily basis. I use Windows 7 for managing my iPhone with iTunes and some light development in Visual Studio.

I installed Ubuntu first and setup my root, home and Windows partition, following these instructions. One fact I discovered is that a hard drive can only have four primary partitions, so partition editors will suggest you make one partition an logical partition and then further divide that into extended partitions. This is all well except that Windows will not let you install to an extended partition. I discovered this after creating the linux partitions so I had to wipe the drive and start again to get Windows it's own primary partition, located after the root Ubuntu partition.

Installing Windows to it's parition will overwrite the GRUB bootloader preventing you from booting Ubuntu. You can fix that by following the instructions here. The example has the 'boot menu' option. This will make the boot menu appear each time you power on the PC. I chose to exclude that option so the PC will boot into Ubuntu by default. Note: when editing menu.lst, place the new stanza at the bottom of the file after the AUTOMAGIC KERNEL LIST.

Once I had Ubuntu installed and booting reliably and started installing my favorite applications. A new one that a friend told me about is Powertop (sudo apt-get install powertop). This app will poll your hardware every five seconds to determine power draw and then make suggestions on how to reduce it by turning on or off features. It shows you in near real time how disabling hardware will reduce your power draw and extend battery life. A must have for all road warriors to acheive the afore mentioned 6 hours of battery life.

The last thing I needed was a good way to access files and services on my home network. To access my desktop I had been using SSH to securly connect to the computer and then tunneling VNC traffic over that SSH connection. But what I really wanted was a VPN solution. So I bought an inexpensive PC off craigslist, put in two gigabit NIC's and installed Smoothwall, a dedicated linux based firewall package with SSL VPN. I'll post about that later as I'm still fiddling with the VPN configuration to get it working just so.

I was really impressed with how easy the Ubuntu install was. It was as easy as following the bouncing ball. No convoluted console jockying, arcane Unix commands or mumbo jumbo. And the best part is that all the hardware just worked. Even all the hot key buttons, with the exceptoin of the mute button, and the signature Thinkpad track point scroll button. But that is easily enabled following these instructions.

Tech | Hardware

Thursday, September 10, 2009 8:49:06 PM (Pacific Daylight Time, UTC-07:00)

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AT&T to America: We can't handle it anymore

I've been an AT&T customer for just over a year now and an iPhone user for just over 6 months. First off let me make it clear that I'm very happy with the device itself. The user interface is intuitive and easy to use. The icons they chose make it obvious, even to the technology challenged how to make a call or look up an address. And the app store is awesome. So many choices for apps from Bejeweled to currency converters to language learning applications. With over 54,000 applications to choose from, there is plenty of opportunity to customize your iPhone experience.

The major downfall of the iPhone was the network it was tied to. I didn't notice it until I got an iPhone, but I started experiencing connectivity issues with both data and voice. I was experiencing dropped calls several times per week and sometimes a few times a day, or sometimes I wouldn't be able to initiate the call at all. Fearing the phone had an issue Apple replaced it under warrenty, but that didn't fix my problems. So my worst fears were confirmed, AT&T's network can't handle the iPhone. Some people at Apple had hinted 3G issues with AT&T, but of course AT&T would never cop to the fact that their network was straining to keep up with the iPhone usage.

Well, now even AT&T has admitted to what most iPhone users already know. They can't handle it. The interesting part of the article is that AT&T is the largest wireless carrier political contributor, spending over $40 million dollars gaining favor in Washington, DC. They state that they never anticipated people to use their handsets that way. So rather than spend their money to upgrade their network resources, they give politicians large sums of money to protect their interests.

I really hope the rumor mills are true and that Verizon will have a 4G iPhone by late next year or early 2011. Due to the fact that Verizon's 4G network and AT&T's 4G network are based on the same technology, it makes a certain amount of sense.