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mercredi, juillet 8 2009

New laptop: Lenovo Ideapad U330

After some though, I decided to switch from my big dual screen workstation (called abydos) to a laptop system. I used this workstation for more than 8 years now (with 2 massive hardware changes) on a desk. But my flat not being that big (you know, Paris, it's expensive to rent), I decided to remove my desktop in favor of my guitar setup. Anyway, doing geek stuff all the day at work, I was not sitting at my desk very often.

I've bought a Lenovo Ideapad U330, which is a really nice machine. It's not like a real ThinkPad (ThinkPad are more expensive) but it's still very nice. It has almost everything a good laptop would have, dual core, 4 GB RAM, 320 GB hard drive, WiFi up to 802.11n, DVD writer, webcam, HDMI, etc. And a not-too-small-not-too-big 13.3" LCD display. It's quite light with only 1.9 Kg, but IMHO, I still think it's a bit heavy. YMMV.

I've installed Debian on it (of course) and everything works like a charm. There's only a little bug with the webcam, since the image is upside down. But I'm pretty sure this is already fixed in kernel > 2.6.30. It has been named keller (Stargate fans will know why).

For now I really recommend this laptop. :-)

jeudi, juillet 31 2008

ATL1E support in 2.6.26-1

Ben Armstrong opened an ITP for the ATL1E NIC driver, which is found on some Asus EeePC laptops. So, as suggested by Maximilian Attems, I provided a clean patch for this driver, made from a cherry-pick from the linux-netdev 2.6.27 tree. It has been commited into the 2.6.26-1 Debian kernel, which will be furnished with Lenny.

What's fun, is that in the mean time, I got a new computer at work. Wait, it's not fun yet. Because what I did not know is that it's made of an Asus P5Q motherboard which runs a NIC needing the ATL1E driver (and now you see it's fun).

So I've just upgraded to 2.6.26-1-amd64 and I'm glad that my own work is useful to me (and will be probably be to others as well). :-)

mardi, mars 4 2008

We've been almost down

I had a big fright this afternoon. My friend ludo asked me to shut down my main server (delmak.naquadah.org) for racking one of my new equipement.

Delmak is my oldest server, hosting almost everything since 5 years. I knew I will have to shut it down some days, but after 280 days of uptime I was pretty confident everything will be allright.

But obviously, it refused to boot again. Fortunately, only the power was burned, and after changing it with a new one, we manage to get delmak booting again.

Now I'm really thinking about some better solution to not having everything on a server that can explose any day now. :-D

dimanche, juillet 22 2007

abydos's dead

My workstation is dead yesterday at 22:01. It did not suffer, the screens simply turned off, and now it does not boot anymore. It seems that the processor is dead.

Four years of good services. Now have to buy a new workstation, sic.

Main consequence for now is that I cannot read my mails anymore for now. Anyway, I'm on holidays for a week.

mercredi, juin 13 2007

New keyboard

I finally buy a new keyboard. After long research over the Web, I decided to buy a Logitech UltraX Media Desktop. I used it for a couple day of now, and I just like it.

Logitech UltraX Media Desktop

It's like a laptop keyboard, since it uses a scissor-switch technology. Finally I think it's a good compromise between fucking dome membrane keyboards and mechanical ones.

dimanche, mai 13 2007

J'veux un clavier

Comme je le disais récemment, j'ai explosé mon clavier avec une bière. Bref, l'accident bête.

Alors cet après-midi, me voilà sur le Web à rechercher un clavier. Le clavier. Je navigue de site en site, de forum en forum, de test en test.

Au début, je me suis dis que j'allais retrouver un Keytronic KT2001 Pro, comme j'avais avant (enfin c'était déjà mon deuxième, le premier avait passer les touches à gauche après trop de whisky-coca). Certes, c'est un clavier à membrane, mais il est de très bonne facture (bien que non-étanche) et a un toucher agréable. Pas de chance, on en trouve plus.

J'ai tout fait. J'ai lu le comparatif de claviers 2007 de Clubic, j'ai lu des dizaines de pages de forum. J'ai même fini par trouvé un topic de gens aussi désesperés que moi de trouver un bon vieux clavier mécanique avec un vrai toucher, dans la lignée des modèles M d'IBM, comme le Cherry G80-3000 . Introuvable. A part que quelques sites allemands pour une bonne centaine d'euros. Pour un clavier que je vais tuer dans un an, je vais éviter.

clavier_dispute.jpg

Ce que j'ai particulièrement adoré lors de mon épopée extraordinaire sur la toile, c'est la qualité des commentaires et des arguments présentants les claviers.

J'ai tout vu. Celui là est en aluminium brossé ! Mais non, celui là a 43 touches de fonction dont une qui permet de lancer-Outlook-Express-avec-le-petit-doigt. Ou alors, peut-être celui avec un écran LCD integré qui donne l'heure et compte le nombre de touche pressée. Cela ne reste pas aussi séduisant que le clavier qui à des ports USB. Le problème c'est qu'il est blanc. Mais cependant j'ai trouvé des claviers étanches, ca pourrait être pas mal vu mon cas. Ah et il y a ausis le clavier à frappe intuitive. Je ne sais pas trop ce que c'est, j'imagine que c'est un clavier ou la touche suivante se met bien en évidence pour ne pas la rater.

Logitech G15

Je vais mixer comme un ouf avec ca !

Mais comble du comble, l'ultime critique la voici:

[…] non sans remarquer que les touches Windows du clavier n'arborent la nouvelle esthétique Windows Vista.

Putain, et dire que j'aurais pu l'acheter et me faire avoir comme un bleu ! Ah, merci Internet !

Et le pire, c'est que j'utilise une keymap qwerty mais que je vais devoir acheter un azerty à tous les coups. A la limite, quitte à être chiant, je vais peut-être me mettre au dvorak pour gueuler encore plus fort.

Ah si j'ai trouvé un bon clavier pour über-geek finalement. Si j'avais 100 euros à claquer dans un clavier, peut-être que je le prendrais.

samedi, mai 12 2007

Another one!

I beat my last record: the last time I killed my keyboard was 2 year and 1 month ago.

Yesterday, some beer decided to go between keys... Argh, another Keytronic dead.

Now I'm looking for a good keyboard for typing every day (please don't recommend me IBM model M or Keytronic, or tell me where to order them :-) ).

mardi, novembre 7 2006

The man who did not know he had an amd64

On sunday, I was looking around at the /proc/cpuinfo on one of my last server. I saw that this Pentium 4 had a lot more of cpu flags that the one on my workstation. I discovered the nx flags and its purpose some days before, but I did not know what the lm flags was for...

Oh my god, that's the 64 bits support. This box is an amd64 and it was installed as an i386. That's like using a knife to kill a kitten when you have an axe!

So, even if the box was 800 km away from me, I decided to reinstall it from scratch, with the help of a serial cable connected on it.

That was so easy. I just love Debian for such things.

  • Step one: recompile linux-2.6-2.6.18 with support for 64 bits processors, that was easy, Goswin Brederlow made a patch I used and adapted in #379090.
  • Step two: scratch your swap and debootstrap an amd64 sarge in it. Copy blindly your /lib/modules/2.6.18-1-amd64 inside.
  • Step three: reboot with your 64 bits kernel on your brand new 64 bits Debian system and launch sshd.
  • Step four: ask everyone on IRC WHY THE HELL you get sshd killed with a fucking kernel backtrace on your serial console each time you try to ssh to your box
  • Step five: listen everyone advices and dist-upgrade to etch
  • Step six: backup all the old data and scratch all your partitions, because you want LVM now. And migrating to 64 bits and LVM at the same time is more dangerous, so more exciting, so more fun.
  • Step seven: move your brand new amd64 etch into your old root partition. Believe in you and that you did not forget anything to backup.
  • Step eight: create your logical volumes and move your stuff in here, like /var, /usr and then blindly reboot. Thanks god you have a serial console.
  • Step nine: apt-get install everything back and upgrade your old sarge conffiles to etch.
  • Step ten: wonder why slapd is segfaulting again and again, and then yell after this fucking Berkeley DB files that are not architecture independant. Flame yourself because you don't have a LDIF backup of your LDAP tree.
  • Step eleven: install a i386 sarge with LDAP to slapcat your old LDAP tree and restore it.
  • Step twelve: Take a break. Have a Kit^Wbeer.

In the end, I'm happy, even if everyone is wondering why I killed a server during 10 hours just because it's better.

jeudi, octobre 12 2006

installgui rulez

I just reinstalled my workstation on two new SATA disks with a recent etch d-i snapshot . That worked really fine, and it was so funny to create RAID 1 + LVM partitions by clicking with a mouse in a GTK interface.

Etch will rocks. 8-)

samedi, août 19 2006

Thinkpad rocks

Thermal 1: ok, 91.0 degrees C

Caused by the fucking Flash plugin sucking 100% CPU for hours (I forgot to close a webpage....)

dimanche, janvier 22 2006

D-Link DWL G520+

For the record: this card has a ACX111 chip, supported by the ACX100/111 driver. I managed to make it work under Debian yesterday.

As today, this card works pretty well but there is still a lot of bugs in the driver. So it is usable, but be aware that once day you may have to do an rmmod && modprobe.

Furthermore, it seems that this card is very sensible about the PCI slot you put it in. At least, putting it in another PCI slot than the last one of my Asus P4P800, makes it act weirdly: PCI id not the same, error writing the firmware, and so on.

lundi, décembre 26 2005

And now...

My laptop hard drive just died. I just hate hardware.

Merry xmas.

vendredi, décembre 23 2005

Kheb is not anymore

Kheb, my old Pentium machine hosted in my parents' house, just died.
I think the CPU is dead. I will replace it with another Pentium II box I have in my flat. Because they are going to get a DSL access in the next days (yeah, we finally got DSL connection in this 700 inhabitans village).

I just updated my history page, just for fun!

mardi, avril 12 2005

Keyboard

Again, my keyboard is dead. Why can't I keep a keyboard more than one year ?

One year ago, my Keytronic was killed by a friend with a whisky-coke...

dimanche, mars 6 2005

New laptop

Yesterday I received my new laptop, it's a Dell Inspiron 510m.

Hardware:

  • Intel Centrino M 1.3 GHz
  • Intel 855GM graphic card
  • 256 MB RAM
  • 15" display XGA (1024x768)
  • Intel PRO/100 Ethernet controller
  • Intel PRO/Wireless LAN 2100 controller
  • CD-RW/DVD
  • 40 GB hard drive
  • Windows XP Home Edition (ahahaha !)

I installed a Debian Sid on it (of course), and everythings works fine.

Its name is shifu.

NB: A good point to Dell: they have not removed the serial port ! I see too many laptop today with no more serial port, and that really suck.

dimanche, février 27 2005

Ashrak won

Ok... You know, sometimes, you wake up and you feel it inside: it's a bad day.

So I was playing supertux on my laptop jolinar when... it powered itself off. Pfioouuu. Nothing more. And I cannot power it on again, the power button seems to do nothing.

Fortunately, my home is managed by Subversion and I made a svn commit 10 minutes before the crash. And I have a 10 days old backup on another machine, so I won't be bothered if I can't get my data back.

But I don't have a laptop anymore. :(

Ashrak are killers from Goa'uld, aiming at killing Tok'Ra rebels. Jolinar of Malkshur was one of them.

samedi, janvier 15 2005

Laptop problem

Since several month, I have a problem with my laptop. When I use the integrated network card, my computer freezes. Let me explain.

If I play a sound file with xmms while I'm surfing, it's ok. But if I stop typing at keyboard, 20-60s after the computer stops. The clock is blocked and the sound does not play anymore. I can't ssh to my laptop neither. When I come back I have to run ntpdate to set the clock back to the good time...

If I use my PCMCIA wifi card or if I unplug my network cable, I do not have any problem anymore.

I tried several driver and several 2.6 kernel for my Intel network card (e100 and eepro100) but it does not change anything. I use alsa for my sound card (snd-es1968).

I think it's an hardware issue, but I am not sure and I don't know why. :(

mercredi, décembre 15 2004

New hard disk for my laptop

Hey, it's Christmas time ! I bought a new hard drive for my laptop (the old was a slow Toshiba 10 GB). It's a Hitachi 40 GB 5400 RPM 8 MB !

I ran a quick-and-dirty installation of Sarge in order to restore a full / backup.

Restore requested to host jolinar, backup #46, by acid from 192.168.2.13

Wait & see.

jeudi, juin 24 2004

Wifi

I just got my wifi devices (a PCMCIA card and an access point). Everything works perfectly !

The card I bought (NetGear WG511T) has not a prism54 chip like I thought, but an Athos one which works perfectly with madwifi drivers.

However, from one meter of my AP, the signal is quiet low I think:

Link Quality=55/94  Signal level=-40 dBm  Noise level=-95 dBm

I wonder if my workstation (Pentium 2.4 GHz) and other machines running around can be so noisy.

mardi, juin 22 2004

Laptop and roaming

Since last Thursday I got a new laptop. My last one was dead one year ago. I wonder what software I could use to change network configuration when I move from home to anywhere (where there is no DHCP)

apt-cache search did not help me because there is a lot of choices, and I would not like to test them all.

So, what do you use ?

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