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New Laptop and Bellingham

Posted on May 22, 2006 | Filed Under Friends, Nerding Out, Vacation

Woo! On Thursday i finally got my new work laptop! Fortunately, it seems to be working just fine. Unfortunately, I didn’t get it working until just now.

On Thursday, I came down with what I think was a mild flu. At 2PM, I had to go home and spend 24 hours in that trance-like state that only dry-heaves and a fever seem to bring on :/. To pass the time, I got Windows XP going (it was pre-installed) and spent five-or-so hours repartitioning the hard-drive so i could install linux. Near the end of those five-or-so hours I realized that the Ubuntu 5.10 CD came with ntfsresize, which lets you resize those crafty NTFS volumes before resizing the partition. I shrunk the Windows XP partition from 55GB to just under 10GB, which should give me plenty of room for now. Windows continues to boot just fine from this new partition after a forced run of chkdsk (think ‘fsck’ for windows) to verify that everything’s OK. This is a big improvement over the last time that I attempted to do a dual-booting system with XP about 2 years ago; resizing NTFS volumes was basically impossible with FLOSS programs. To finish off, I tried installing Ubuntu 5.10, but various things didn’t seem to work, especially X.

On Friday I was on the upswing and decided to go to BJF after a bit of convincing by Luke. I left the laptop here and got a ride from Luke along with jen, Loranda (Luke’s sister), and Orlando (Loranda’s fiance). I wouldn’t have had any time or network connectivity anyway, it turns out. Overall, it was a great trip. Lots of juggling, some good shows (a renegade show on Friday night and the public show on Saturday), and lots of fun people to meet and hang out with. Sleeping in a rigged-together barn in the middle of a swamp is quite the experience ;). I think that maybe Luke cought whatever I had on Thursday, though; we had to leave a little early on Sunday because he wasn’t feeling well. Luke, if you’re reading this: I’m sorry if i got you sick, but you’re the one who dragged me with you :P. Either way, I’m really glad I went. I started doing 4-ball and won in a raffle these really neat micro-suede “G-Ballz” beanbag-style juggling balls — they’ve inspired me to try to learn a 5-ball pattern as soon as possible ;).

Got back home on Sunday at around 4 or 5-ish. Had some real food (after an “interesting” breakfast at the farm) and settled in. Made four CD coasters trying to burn the latest Ubuntu 6.x beta release, then decided that the whole stack of blanks I’ve got are total crap after realizing that i’ve never successfully burnt one with this new burner. I found a 12x CDRW disk and it burnt just fine. In the process, I found out that there’s a command-line cd burning program for windows (I forget the name just now, but it’s actually made by Microsoft). In the meantime, I found a really helpful page by someone who got Slackware installed on the Dell D620. Aparently, you have to actually “soft-patch” part of the video BIOS to get full 1440×900 resolution under X.

Anyway, got Ubuntu “Dapper Beta” installed, but X still didn’t work. Downloaded 300MB of updates from the APT repository while watching the first half Lord of the Rings: Return of the King with Laura. Followed the instructions on the afformentioned page, and voila: a Gnome desktop. Looks really nice with anti-aliased fonts and the widescreen ;). CPU auto-scaling works, but I haven’t tried an SMP kernel yet (it’s a dual-core CPU). Something keeps accessing the hard-drive all the time, which clicks every few seconds (maybe i need to mount everything ‘noatime’?). Sound works OK, but is crappy quality — speaking of which, i can’t find the speakers on this thing — and the PC speaker is so blaringly loud i’m sure the neighbours can hear it every time i try to use tab completion in bash :).

Anyway, i’m quite happy to have this thing up and working. This whole post is just an excuse to try out the keyboard. The verdict: it is fairly spacious compared to some i’ve tried. My wrists aren’t incredibly sore, but then again, that could be from not typing for 2 days. I’ll take the MS Natural Ergo 4000 over this any day.

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