In my new life as an itinerant entrepreneur, spending significant amounts of time both working from strange places and travelling on trains, my productivity depends at least in part on having a good development laptop. In my other current life lecturing in Creative Computing, I also need to be able to display reliably to a data projector. Neither of these was a problem until relatively recently.
For the last four years or so, after obtaining a recommendation from
one of the masters of Linux
and laptops, I've used an IBMlenovo X40: light,
fairly rugged (has survived at least one drop), almost full-sized
keyboard, and – importantly – fits into more or less any
carrying equipment. However, the relative instability (which I am not the
only one to experience) brought about by the change in Linux and
X.org's to Kernel-Mode Switching was beginning to get worrying; the
X40 has an Intel 855GM graphics card, which since Intel is
participating heavily in KMS support and development, means that new
things got turned on early; I follow squeeze (Debian testing), which gives me some
of the thrills and spills of being on the leading edge of consumer
Linux development; most pertinently for the start of the new academic
year, I've been suffering from odd display corruption on the VGA
output.
In various combinations of Xorg and kernel versions, trying to work out a set of versions that work for me, I have experienced
- intermittent (about once a day) X server crashes, leaving the hardware in a sufficiently inconsistent state that the X server refuses to start again (linux v2.6.33ish, xserver-xorg-video-intel 2.9.1)
- failure to start the X server on boot at all (linux v2.6.33ish, xserver- xorg-video-intel 2.12.0+legacy1-1)
- missing mouse cursor on X server start (linux v2.6.35, xserver-xorg- video-intel 2.9.1)
- substantial (~0.5s) latency about once every 10 seconds, with kslowd or kworkqueue processes taking about 20% of the CPU (linux v2.6.35 and v2.6.36-rc3, xserver-xorg-video-intel 2.9.1)
The good news is that a large number of Intel-graphics-related fixes appeared in Linus' master branch yesterday, and at least some of these problems are fixed; with a module parameter poll=0 for the kms_drm_helper module, the 0.5s latencies are gone (put options kms_drm_helper poll=0 in a file in /etc/modprobe.d). The VGA corruption I was experiencing seems to have been fixed somewhere between Linux versions 2.6.33 and 2.6.35; I have hopes, too, that the X server crashes might be substantially less frequent (but I haven't been running a single kernel long enough to check yet). The one remaining issue that is definitely still present is the missing mouse cursor when X first starts; a suspend/resume cycle works around this fairly reliably for me. Thank you to all those who've worked on fixing these problems.
I'm particularly glad that all of this is just about sufficiently fixed, because the alternative would have been to get a new laptop, and as well as my natural disinclination to purchase new stuff when not strictly necessary (and let's face it, the initial phases of a startup are not usually those where money is abundant), it seems to be largely impossible to get a new one with the form factor of the X40: with the growing prevalence of widescreens, just about every modern laptop is substantially bigger than this one, and thus would not fit in some of my carrying equipment. I will just have to preserve this one as long as possible.