10 Jul 2004 mbanck   » (Journeyer)

I've got a new notebook. Somehow, I managed to get my parents to buy me a Thinkpad R51, after they got me to give my old notebook to my sister so she can write up her Master thesis.

The Thinkpad is extremely slick of course, albeit not extremely small or light. Installing Debian on it was pretty painless, I actually enjoy having a fresh install finally and watching how everything just works. However, it took me a while to figure out how to make exim4 work with GMX and SMTP-Auth and I still haven't figured out how to nicely integrate exim with tsocks, as I am still behind a SOCKS-proxy. Regarding the WLAN, I managed to install the ipw2100 centrino drivers in short time when I finally bothered. It's great to finally see drivers for this available, although they still require firmware.

APM suspend-to-ram is working very well, but I would like to have ACPI to also throttle the CPU and all. Unfortunately, going to ACPI S3 state and back somehow corrupts the WLAN and ethernet drivers, they stop to work after a while. Putting the Thinkpad to sleep and waking it up again makes the drivers work for a bit more. I just hope this gets fixed some day.

Other that that, I'm very happy with my Thinkpad. The keyboard is awesome (although it took me a while to adopt that the Esc key is above F1 now, being a vi junkie) and the display is great. GNOME-2.6 looks more beautiful than ever. Having a state-of-the-art CPU and 512MB RAM also helps a lot when compiling code. The only drawback is that history is repeating, though this time getting the Gigabit NIC working with GNU Mach might be harder. I plan to take the USB-2.0 and FireWire ports into use and buy an external harddisk case so I can take my data more easily with me.

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