Linux Blog

Ok, so there that been a lot of smugness in the Apple community about the new MacBook Air, which I must say is a stunning looking notebook. Although tiny it is still not the lightest of notebooks weighing in at 3.0 pounds. Here I’ve got an alternative to the MacBook Air. Although not as pretty it should get the job done.

This is a slightly slower Core 2  Duo at 1.2GHz and a 12.1″ Screen but its a worthy laptop for any road warrior

The Portege R500.  Right from Toshibas website comes this statement:

The Ultimate Ultraportable
With its ultralight design and stunning silhouette, the feather light 1.72 pound* Portégé® R500 Series is the transcendent expression of executive mobility and style. Offering the world’s lightest* widescreen 12.1″ notebook PC in one configuration, and the world’s thinnest widescreen 12.1″ notebook PC with an integrated DVD-SuperMulti drive in another, the Portégé® R500 Series represents an uncompromising synthesis of portability and productivity that’s meticulously engineered for the demands of executive computing.

*Lightest model configuration of 1.72 lbs is based on a 64GB solid state drive (SSD), a 3 cell battery and no optical disk drive. The Portégé® R500 with the solid state drive will not be available until the end of July 2007. Weight may vary. See Weight Legal Footnote at www.info.toshiba.com.
Here are the dimensions:

• Dimensions (WxDxH Front/H Rear): 11.1” x 8.5” x .77”(f)/

1.0”(r) without feet

• Weight: Starting at at 2.4 lbs, depending upon

configuration10

• LCD Cover Color: Aluminum Silver

It boasts on the flyer that its the worlds thinnest 12” widescreen which I can believe since it is .01” Thicker in the thinnest part then the MacBook Air. Don't think that with the lack of size on this laptop that you get skimpy options like the MacBook Air either. You get Three, yes I repeat Three USB 2.0 ports, Firewire, Gigabit Ethernet, a/g/n wifi for all of your wireless internet needs. 1 Type II PCMCIA slot, an optional DVD Burner a 6 Cell 5800mAh battery, SD Slot and all kinds of other goodies that you would expect from a laptop. I'm sure if they removed some of these lovely features they could make it thinner. It has the same resolution as the MacBook Air but is a little skimpy on the RAM with 1GB but makes up for it with a 3 year warranty on the hardware and a 1 year warranty on the battery.

They claim that you can get 8.18 hours from this battery so I'd love to get my hands on one of these to play around with powertop to see if it could get even more.

Lenovo have some sweet ThinkPads that are under 3lbs also. I can't find the exact measurements of them but I'm sure they don't come close to the Toshiba or the Air. Actually looking at these specs I think I got a pretty decent deal on my Toshiba Tecra M2 which has done me good so far. It has the following dimensions: 12.3” x 10.1” x 1.2/1.4” and is apparently 4.98 lbs although it feels more like 6. Its a single core 1.7 but I bet you it will boot faster than the MacBook Air. Resume also works too. All in all I probably saved about $1300 by purchasing my laptop. I think they still have some of the Tecra's I have left, they are a pretty good deal at ~$420. Shoot an e-mail if your interested.

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I got a new Linux desktop for use at my office.  All right, so its not entirely new but the price was right!

Here are the specs:

Motherboard: MSI K9N6SGM
CPU: AMD Sempron 3400+ 256 KB Cache, 1808.430 MHz and 3620.23 Bogomips (Slightly more than my laptop)
Ram: 1GB Generic Ram
Hard Drive: 80GB Sata Drive
Power Supply: 350 Watt

Now, considering I only paid around $200 for all of this I think I did pretty good. I already had an fairly new e-machine that was given to me with a fried motherboard, power supply and hard drive, so I used the Case DVD, Rom and CD-RW drive. Its a pretty fast machine so far. The onboard video happens to be a GeForce so I’m happy about my 3D Graphics support.

What is even better is that if you would like to support The Linux Blog and happen to need a new computer, you can call The Tech Fellows at (704) 780-4932 and tell them that The Linux Blog sent you and they will hook you up. Even if you just need parts they can help and normally can match Tiger Directs prices.

I will let you know how the rest of the installation of Slackware goes and post some benchmarks some time.

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eRacks is one of the links that appears in the Google ads on this page. It just so happens that I have experience with eRacks. They have some awesome servers available. I believe they may have the fastest Linux server in a 1U package available for delivery. I’m sure you could custom build something your self, but for the price they are well worth checking out.

My configuration was a TwinServe box, which is basically two computers in one so this may be cheating a little. Anyway, I configured it as follows:

1U TWINSERVE chassis, for dual systems, 900W PS
TWINSERVE dual X7DBT dualCPU Intel Xeon 5300/5100
CPU’s for motherboard 1: 2 x Intel Xeon Quad-Core E5365 3.0GHz 1333FSB CPU Add $2945
CPU’s for motherboard 2: 2 x Intel Xeon Quad-Core E5365 3.0GHz 1333FSB CPU Add $2945
16GB of RAM for each Motherboard
4 1TB Drives (Two for each motherboard)
Debian Etch Preinstalled
and a $25 donation to the OpenSSH Project

Total Price: $13855.00 before taxes shipping and handling. For the price, I think its a steal. Thats two quad core 3.0GHz CPU’s in each motherboard, so (3.0GHz * 4)2. 24GHz per motherboard for a total of 48GHz. 32GB ram, and 2TB of raid+1. This is basically the same thing the Mac’s have in their Mac Pro’s except this is in a 1U Chassis, and there is two motherboards. I configured a Mac Pro, just to see what kind of price they offer, and for comparison. I mean there is no denying that the Mac Pro’s are sexy, but is the cost worth it? Now, I configured these the same, 3.0GHz, 16GB Ram (One Motherboards worth) and two 1TB HD’s. I didn’t want the extra crap that Apple bundles in such as the MightyMouse, Apple Keyboard with Mac OSX and the Superdrive because this is a server. We don’t need any of that. Now, one thing that Apple has our system beat on is the graphics, but again note this is a server, but the graphics could be updated if needed. So, the final thing other than looking at how pretty the case is was the price. To my Amazement it wasn’t too shabby the cost only $8849 but then I remembered that the box I configured was this times two. So to compare Penguins to Apples we would need to double that and add taxes for both of them. Shipping is free so the grand total is: $18,892.62. This is quite a price tag and also a hefty package. Here is the Dimensions for each case:

• Height: 20.1 inches (51.1 cm)
• Width: 8.1 inches (20.6 cm)
• Depth: 18.7 inches (47.5 cm)

The size of the eRacks is a tiny 1U meaning 1″ High X 19″ Width x 705mm Deep. There are so many specs to play with and they are dirt cheap. Take a look at the page, you can find the Twin Motherboard Servers under the special purpose website on their website.

I’d have to get a massive loan to afford something like this. A loan larger than my car payment, but you never know maybe when my cars paid off I can get one. At least I wouldn’t have to finance the $18,000 that Apple would charge me, that would be crazy. $414 a month for the apple with an interest of 5% over 4 years, or our double spec system with the same loan terms for $319.07. A difference of $4556.64 for both of them. That’s one third the cost of another double motherboard dual quad core server. I wonder if by the time the loan would end if I would need to buy another computer or not. Interesting concept but I don’t know if I currently need 48GHz of computing power right now.

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I’ve often thought to my self “Wouldn’t knowing how much battery life I had be nice.”

Now when a window manager is open, this isn’t a problem. But when your just in a terminal it can be a bit of a problem. If you don’t get the gist of it heres an example, if I’m just in a terminal writing an article, or programming in VIM on battery life. Now I no longer have to execute the following command and guess how much life I have left:

 cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state

I simply run the command:

yacpi

It tells me all kinds of information about my power usage, what the current temperature is, am I plugged in, what CPU governor I’m using. Its a really neat tool. I would recommend for everyone to install it. Worst case scenario it can be used when the system is undergoing maintenance, or if you left your box sitting in the other room and need to check the battery live via SSH. Check out the screenshot:

To install it it will vary by distribution. I’m sure Debian has it in its XXXX number of packages which means Ubuntu probably has it too. To install on other distributions such as Gentoo or Slackware you’ll need the source. You can acquire the source from here: http://freshmeat.net/redir/yacpi/55486/url_homepage/yacpi
You’ll also need libacpi which can be found here: http://freshmeat.net/projects/libacpi/?branch_id=70062
Make sure you compile libacpi first, or the make will fail for yacpi.

That’s it, once you download the package and install or download and compile the source you’re good to go. Have a good time checking the battery life from the shell. Try doing that in DOS!

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If you read my post about my Toshiba Portege 4010 you would know that I mentioned in their that it was a little too slow. I couldn’t do the things I needed to do, such as virtualization or play Quake3. So for an early Christmas present to I sold my Toshiba Portege 4010 and I purchased a used Toshiba Tecra M2 laptop. The specs are pretty decent for the amount I paid for it.

CPU: 1.7GHz PM
RAM: 512MB (Needs upgrading)
HD: 40GB -> Upgraded to 100GB
Graphics: GeForce Fx 5200 toGo 64MB.
Media: CDRW-DVD Combo, Firewire, USB 2.0, 2PCMCIA Card Slots
Network: 10/100/1000 B/G Wireless

The battery life is not as good as my old Portege 4010 but with the time I save by not waiting on the CPU I can normally get my Quake3 I mean work done in time to find a power outlet.

The Tecra M2 has excellent support for Linux. The only thing thats not supported that I’m working on is the SD Card reader. This is the same situation as the Portege’s as they use the same hardware.

I’ll be making a post for any body wanting to run a real Linux distribution on a Toshiba Tecra M2.

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I’ve got a new to me video card to temporarily service as my video card until I can get a cooling kit for my GeForce FX 5200. Its an older GeForce 4 Ti 4200 AGP8X. I thought it would be as simple as plugging it into my agp slot, turning the computer on and re-installing the NVIDIA driver module but I was wrong.

The problem is, since this is an older card I have to use a legacy driver:

WARNING: The NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 with AGP8X GPU installed in this system
is supported through the NVIDIA 1.0-96xx legacy Linux graphics
drivers. Please visit http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html for
more information. The 100.14.11 NVIDIA Linux graphics driver will
ignore this GPU.

If you can’t see the screen shot click it. Its basically a pretty version of the above error message that tells me that I need to use the: “NVIDIA 1.0-96xx legacy Linux Driver”. Here is the download page for the driver if your running into the same problem: http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_x86_96.43.01.html

You can temporarily use the “nv” driver in your XORG configuration but be warned this is not accelerated so you should just use it to download the legacy driver, quit X and then install the accelerated one. Unfortunately I could not get links or lynx to download from nVidia’s site because of some strange javascript code. I find it Ironic that the Unix drivers page isn’t even compatible with the basic Unix browsers.

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At the moment I am a little unhappy with my Linux Box. It was making funny sounds (more than normal) the other night so I decided to turn it off. When I turned it back on, it was making even more racket. Turns out that my video card has been toasted, literally. The picture on the left shows the damage. Its pretty evident that the fan stopped spinning and burned up.

So much for my 128MB GeForce FX 5200.

I have an older GeForce laying around somewhere but I’ll have to use the legacy drivers. Until I find the card don’t fear I’ll be continuing to blog on my laptop. Which isn’t the best machine to use, but it will get the job done. Also from this experience I have thought of an blog post to write: dealing with hardware failure.

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Along with my desktop I also have a laptop that is in dire need of an upgrade. It is a Toshiba Portege 4010. Although its age and its specifications (or lack of) it is still a decent ultra portable laptop. The battery life is great (4-6 hours) and its very light weight. Here are the specs:

CPU: 933MHz Pentium M
Ram: 512MB Shared
HD: 100GB Seagate 5400RPM
Media: CD-RW/DVD Combo Drive.
Network: Integrated 10/100 & Orinoco B Wifi.

I like its slim line style and cool features like the SD Card Reader, Firewire, Infrared and Toshiba Select Bay. But unfortunately I’ve not been able to get the SD Card or Infrared to work. The video card is also lacking, its a Trident Cyberblade and it doesn’t have very good support. I have to run X in VESA frame buffer mode which isn’t as bad as it sounds but without tweaking it is unable to play DVD’s.

The Toshiba ACPI extras work really well in conjunction with fnfxd. Brightness, Volume, Screen Change and Lock Screen are the only short cuts I set up. The system also suspends to disk & ram with no problems.

I also run Slackware 12 on my laptop and have trimmed it down to boot Linux faster and provide better battery life. It boots to login in about 30 seconds. The picture above is a picture I took in the kitchen. The desktop is XFCE from Slackware-current, click on the image to view more photos of my Toshiba Portege 4010.

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Maybe its just me but I find it interesting to look at other peoples computer stuff so I’m going to take the time to write some blog posts about my hardware.

First in my lineup is my Desktop. This is by no means a new computer but runs very well.
CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2500+
Motherboard: MSI KT400
Memory: 512MB DDR 333
Hard Drive: 160GB Maxtor
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce FX5200
Ethernet: ADMtek NC100 Network Everywhere 10/100
Media Devices: CD-RW, Floppy, ATA133 Hard Drive Bay
Monitor: LG 19″ Flat Panel. DVI, VGA, 1280×1024. 4ms 1400:1
Keyboard/Mouse: Generic Staples $10 special and a unknown brand painted laser mouse.

Every device is supported by the 2.6 kernel and Linux runs very well on it. The motherboard uses a VIA chip set and a C-Media audio device. The CPU is
actually 1875.733 MHz with a 512KB cache. According to cat /proc/cpuinfo it has a bogomips rating of 3754.8

Now comes the sensitive part, my distro of choice. For some this is a sour topic but I’ll just say that it doesn’t really matter to me. I run windows on it before and most Linux distributions out perform it out of the box (after installing video drivers.) I choose to run Slackware 12 on it because of the simplicity. It took a little while to configure it how I like but it turned out pretty well. I use slackpkg to keep it current.

I’ll be sure to post some pictures of the setup some time.

Thats about all I have to say about my desktop, if you have any questions or would like any additional information just give me an e-mail at: owen @ thelinuxblog.com

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I’ve added a new category to The Linux Blog. It is called: “Linux hardware” Any posts I make that include a specific device or device setup will be found in this category. It will also be used to post news about upcoming devices, devices I wish I had and anything else related to hardware.
Now I have to do a pitch: If any readers have questions, cool new hardware, hardware to review or would like a showcase in The Linux Blog about their hardware please send an e-mail to me: owen @ thelinuxblog.com

Thats all for now folks!

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