We made it! Since last Friday (pretty late) night, we're officially in Rhode Island. For the time being, we're staying at Ginny-B campground, and they are a pretty decent place. I mean, they didn't prevent the rain yesterday, but you don't get that at many campsites anyway.

Even better, we're looking at two apartments that we might actually want to move in to. We just need to figure out which, since, how else could it be, Josie likes one, and I like the other. 8)

More later. Wish us luck. Things are great. :)

Let me tell you the statistics on my recent moves:

Karlsruhe to Singen

• Packed the night before until: 5am (and continued next morning)
• Amount: 10 moving boxes, plus countless other stuff
• Means of transportation: Car with trailer

Singen to Trenton, North Carolina, USA

• Packed the night before until: 4:30am
• Amount: Two suitcases, 22kg and 24kg, plus one bike case with bunches of extra stuff in it, 28kg
• Means of transportation: Airplane

Trenton, North Carolina, USA to Providence, Rhode Island, USA

• Packed the night before until: 2:10am (but continued next morning)
• Amount: Two suitcases, three boxes, lots of little stuff
• Means of transportation: Car

Trenton, North Carolina, USA to Providence, Rhode Island, USA, Part 2

• Packed the night before until: n/a
• Amount: Lots, lots, lots and lots
• Means of transportation: U-Haul driven by Josie's Da

In short, yes, we've safely landed in North Carolina, and we're driving to Rhode Island today, with an overnight stop in Maryland. Wish us a safe drive. I sure do. ;)

Oh, and I would like to add that, for the time being, I have totally moved enough times. Don't need another move in the next few years. I really don't. 8)

While I'm in the process of packing up all my stuff, why don't you help me out by buying some? I'd, you know, really appreciate that. And, knowing that it was mine, you know that it's some quality junk. ;) And I do take Paypal.

You can also find us at the flea market in Singen tomorrow (i.e. Saturday). Come and give us your money. Oh, and take our stuff, too.

This post summarizes my experience of making the hardware in my shiny new IBM ThinkPad R52 work with Linux.

I initially tried Debian on this computer, but later on headed over to Ubuntu with a home-built kernel for a bunch of reasons on which I won't elaborate here. Update: I've been back on Debian for a good while now.

The following remarks relate to Linux version 2.6.12.3, if not otherwise specified.

Serial ATA: Intel ICH6

The Debian Sarge installer, using the "kernel26" option, fails to recognize the hard disk. The default 2.4 kernel works ok.

After building my own kernel, using the Intel PIIX/ICH SATA support (SCSI_ATA_PIIX) driver worked fine for the hard disk, but the PATA DVD/CDRW/CDROM was not found. The first attempt was to compile support for PATA into the kernel as well (not just as a module), as the driver's help states:

      This option enables support for ICH5 Serial ATA.
      If PATA support was enabled previously, this enables
      support for select Intel PIIX/ICH PATA host controllers.

However, this is only one part of the way there. The next part is to change

#undef ATA_ENABLE_ATAPI         /* define to enable ATAPI support */
#undef ATA_ENABLE_PATA          /* define to enable PATA support in some
                                 * low-level drivers */

into

#define ATA_ENABLE_ATAPI        /* define to enable ATAPI support */
#define ATA_ENABLE_PATA         /* define to enable PATA support in some
                                 * low-level drivers */

in include/linux/libata.h. I'm really puzzled why this is not on by default.

Update: In Kernel 2.6.14, this patch is no longer necessary (or possible, for that matter). Instead, append libata.atapi_enabled=1 to your boot command line.

Update: In Kernel 2.6.16, there is a bad interaction of early versions of suspend2 and libata, which prevents ATAPI devices from working. The fix is to upgrade suspend2.

Modem: A Conexant HCF WinModem

You need to buy the driver from Linuxant to actually make this work. The snd-intel8x0m module loads, but does not work, so the Smartlink modem daemon can't work with this, at least not yet.

Graphics: Intel i915

Intel i915, supported out of the box by X.Org, using the 2.6.12.3 stock DRI module for that card. Two things made life with this chip a lot better:

Section "Device"
    Identifier      "Intel Corporation Intel Default Card"
    Driver          "i810"
    BusID           "PCI:0:2:0"
    Option          "MonitorLayout" "CRT,LFP"

    # NOTE THESE TWO
    VideoRam        65536
    Option          "DDC"   "false"
EndSection

The VideoRam option makes the card use more main memory during 3D operation, which makes many GL applications lots faster, because there's less texture thrashing going on.

The DDC option allowed me to use my NEC Multisync LCD 1860NX with the card; when the option was not specified, it refused to come up with anything higher than 640x480.

Update: I have recently gotten multihead to work, so that I am now using an LCD and the laptop panel side-by-side. Pretty wicked cool. I've attached a working xorg.conf.

Network: Broadcom Tigon3

Works great using the tg3 driver.

The only stumbling block is that Debian refuses to include this driver in its stock 2.6 kernels, since it has a builtin firmware blob. Nathanael Nerode, however, recently made a patch that splits this out into a separate file, which would allow distribution with Debian in the future.

Update: Debian seems to have come to its senses; the tg3 driver is back in the stock kernels as of 2.6.14, at least.

WLAN: Intel IPW2200BG

Theoretically supported through the ipw2200 driver, but this is really flaky right now. Early versions (0.19, IIRC) drop the connection every once in a while and need to be reloaded to work again. Newer versions (>1.0.4) are bitten by "Firmware error" messages, as detailed in this bug log. No solution as yet.

Update: Version 1.0.3 is reported working somewhere, but it apparently needs a patch to compile against 2.6.12.3. I haven't tried this yet.

Update: Version 1.0.0, as included in Kernel 2.6.14, works like a charm. Get firmware version 2.2 to go with it. Better yet, this version is also in the Debian stock kernels.

Sound: Intel AC'97

No problems using the ALSA snd-intel8x0 driver.

Power management

SpeedStep and ACPI work out of the box with the appropriate drivers. Suspend-to-RAM works, just like -to-disk, even though currently, 3D (DRI, that is) can't be used after wakeup.

Other things

The display is very bright, even a bit too bright for my taste. The keyboard is excellent, as is usual for IBM machines. The fan is louder than on my old ThinkPad A21m, but with the processing power of a Pentium-M running at 1.7 GHz, I am supposing that this was to be expected. I'm a bit concerned that the ACPI Thermal Zone 0 reports temperatures of 76 degrees Celsius under sustained peak load, which sounds a bit high. But then, the trip point is at 90 degrees, so I guess it's fine.

Also, I'm currently trying to return the copy of Windows XP that came with the machine, and on the upside, my complaint has not yet been smacked down by Lenovo. So there is some hope. I'll write a detailed report once this is over.

I'll keep this report updated as I continue to tame the hardware. Martin Schwenke's page on the T43, quoted above, was of great help in getting everything to run.

Suspend-to-Disk/Suspend-to-Ram

Suspend to Disk is straightforward, for Suspend to RAM to work you need one little non-obvious trick: specify acpi_sleep=s3_bios on the command line. Also make sure that vbetool does not mess with your video card (i.e. no repost, no state saving). Thanks to ThinkWiki for the hint.

Conclusion

I'm perfectly happy with the machine. :)

The pictures from our trip to London are up. Enjoy this one, as well.

I'll update this post with an account of the trip soon-ish. Before then, let me just add that you should not stay at the "Smart Backpackers Hyde Park Inn Hostel", even though they tend to be dirt cheap. You'll regret it...

Did you ever wonder how much the terms "guilt" and "office" are connected? Did you ever wish to just relax while working (and have your work benefit from it), but didn't actually do so, since it looks bad? Wish you could work at home, knowing you'd be more effective there? Did nine-to-five ever feel like a nice corset, like an excuse for not getting work done? Do you want to know why there's no way past proper discipline? I felt many of these things during my days at Prof. Dörfler's institute, as a consequence of having a proper office, colleagues and all, but I was never really able to put them into context or come to a conclusion on what to do about them.

Paul Graham, of whose writing I've been a fanboy for a while, says it straight and to the point, and many of his points seem like appropriate endpoints of thoughts I've had.

I'm glad I found this before starting grad school for several reasons:

• Now I know I'm not alone in feeling like this.
• Feeling guilty about stuff is nearly always a bad idea.
• It's almost always a better idea to just do what you think is reasonable, even if it looks bad.

Duh? Maybe. But I challenge you to live by these principles every day. (And myself, too.)

PS: Sorry that this is propagated straight from Slashdot. But then, I think it's too important to miss.

The pictures from our trip to Augsburg are up. Enjoy.

To follow up on the previous post, my laptop did find its way back to life. But unfortunately, only briefly so. It started all the way into X just once, and now seems to be dead forever. In the light of this, I've given in and ordered aramis's successor, tentatively named little-bear grizzly. (I was looking for something a bit more manly than little-bear.) :)

In the meantime, the only reliable computer I've had is at work, while at home, I first had the apartment server, then my mom's PC, which I had fortunately begun to build before my laptop died, then my parents' old PC (a K6-300, yuck!) and now the apartment-server-turned-my-dad's-PC once again. All these computers have been blessed with kubuntu, which I can recommend as a really sweet piece of engineering. It makes installing a Debian system with non-server-capabilities easier than ever before.

Work is promising to be busy for the rest of my time there, with a bunch of trivial things still to be done, and other, less trivial, but more fun things expected (like a few good pointers on where to take my past thesis work, and someone else in the physics department to bounce ideas off of). Private life will be equally as busy, with

• a trip to France
• a trip to Great Britain
• a farewell party for myself
• packing & moving to Providence

all lined up.

Unfortunately, all this means that most of my private projects are on hold until everything settles again, which I pretty much do not expect to happen until October or so. Indeed, these are turbulent times.

Update: grizzly has landed on my desk, and thus far, I'm really happy with it. Except for one dead (red) pixel at the top right of my screen. Which doesn't really matter. :yes:

This July 4th could have been better. While it was a very appropriate day to get my visa (yay!), the evening was actually fairly bad. First, I discovered that a heavy rainstorm this afternoon has found its way into my laptop through an opened window. As yet, the laptop is drying, and as far as I can tell, the hard drive is dry. So this might be just monetary damage.

Then, I find out that Drupal has a few severe security bugs. I upgraded my (recent-version) site and yanked the plug from Josie's. I can almost already hear her complain. I've also yanked the gallery site, as I'm not sure whether its software is affected.

Altogether, the good thing is that tomorrow can't be much worse.

Update: How appropriate. At present, the house does not have running water. What next?

A friend of mine, Hendrik, is on Spiegel Online with his pet project, the Stanford entry into the DARPA grand challenge. His team also made Slashdot a while ago. :D

Go, Hendrik! Will you ever talk to me again, now that you're famous? ;)