Of Laptops and Tribulations

I finally gave up and bought a laptop, thus breaking my streak of adopting unwanted hardware (my desktop box was the third machine I literally found in the street). The laptop is a ThinkPad T60p; I owe rajiv a big thank-you for reminding me to take advantage of the deal my school has with Lenovo, which translated into a 45% discount. indefatigable is a dual-core 2.16GHz Pentium M (Yonah), 100GB SATA hdd, 1GB RAM, and an ATI Mobility FireGL V5200. All I can say is, this is a beast. After invincible, a PIII 733MHz, this thing flies. Better yet, all the bells and whistles work with Linux, save one.

- CPU: -march=pentium-m, SMP
- SATA HD: works with ahci
- sound: ALSA with intel-hda-snd
- encrypted / and swap: I followed a couple of guides. It wasn't as straightforward as I had hoped: it took me a while to figure out the right setup for the initramfs image (uclibc/busybox, static gpg and cryptsetup binaries). gpg was complaining about the wrong console, and it took me a while to grok that the kernel was using /dev/console instead of /dev/tty. It was smooth sailing after that, and now I've got a fully encrypted setup.
- Power management: kernel CPU governor automatically adjusts speed when running on battery. Hibernate to RAM works beautifully after applying a couple of >patches
- Graphics: works with ati-drivers-8.24.8, but xorg.conf needs to explicitly specify ChipID=0x71c5. DRI seems to work fine, although the system tends to lock up after quitting X. Oh well.
- Wireless: works fine with ipw3945.
- Ethernet: e1000
- Built-in fingerprint reader: had to tweak a few of ebuilds out there, and screw around with PAM modules (folks, always keep a root console open when operating machinery^WPAM), but now I can log in by just swiping a finger;
- Extra buttons: sound/mute and reading light work out of the box. Thanks to tpb and XOSD, I have on-screen indicators just like on Windows. Back/Forward buttons work with xmodmap. As a side note, it turned out that the Windows key wasn't recognized by X as a meta key. I had copied over my old Fluxbox keys file, and was quite amused when instead of typing a, o, r, and i flux was opening up a bunch of programs. Sure made editing the config file in vim a lot of fun.
- I haven't tested bluetooth and IR yet, but I don't really care.
- The one thing that doesn't work at the moment is the built-in accelerometer which can be set up to park the hd when the laptop is bumped. There's a driver out there, but it seems that the IBM->Lenovo switch changed some hardware identifiers and the kernel module doesn't recognize the device. Someone has posted a patch to the mailing list out there, but I'm in no rush.

Also, I just discovered conky, the ultimate system monitor. I was never happy with gkrellm, and conky is waaay better.

As far as reusing old hardware: I shelled out $100 for a Hauppauge 350 card and turned invincible into a MythTV box. It has ~250GB of storage in hardware RAID-0, which should do nicely.

So, pretty much everything I need works, VMware is happily compiling my dev setup, and it's finally nice out. Life is good, kids.