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Marvin Johanning
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title: Adventures in setting up a T60 with a modern OS — Awaiting the laptop
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I've been meaning to get a secondary laptop for a long time but I have for some reason kept putting it off — but that is no more! I decided to get an old IBM ThinkPad T60 which is a laptop I had previously used as well; in fact, I still have a photo that I took of my T61 way back when.
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{:class="img-responsive"}
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Therefore, I thought it would be great to have another one of these very sturdy and nigh indestructible laptops to take with me when I have to go places for work (or just a nice laptop that I can take with me whenever I go to the woods or something).
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Thus, a few days ago I started looking online to see if I could find a nice old ThinkPad for a somewhat low price; and, luckily, a day ago I finally found one! Someone in my city was selling an old IBM ThinkPad T60 for merely €25 which I thought was a decent price. It has 2048 MB of RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo with 1.8 GHz which is perfect for what I need. The battery still works too, apparently, but it doesn't have a lot of capacity left it seems.
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This may be mitigated slightly by not using Windows and instead installing one of my very minimal Arch GNU/Linux installs. But since there are a tonne of batteries still available for this type of laptop, I could quite easily buy a new one — which, funnily enough, cost as much as the laptop or even more (€19.99 to €35 for a new battery, depending on the manufacturer and capacity)
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I will be getting the laptop tomorrow and I will post here again with some more updates. I will try installing Arch or Manjaro with either DWM or i3-gaps (I'm not entirely sure which one I'll choose yet) and it should hopefully work somewhat well.
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Depending on what kind of RAM / HDD is installed in the computer, I will be upgrading it somewhat. 100 GB of HDD should be more than enough for my uses, but I was unfortunately unable to figure out how much disk space the machine actually has; and I will perhaps upgrade the RAM slightly (to 4 GB), depending on the kind of RAM that is installed on the machine (My guess is SODIMM DDR2, but I'm not 100% certain).
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Well, we'll hear from each other tomorrow!
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layout: post
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title: Adventures in setting up a T60 with a modern OS — First impressions
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---
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{:class="img-responsive"}
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Yesterday I created a post talking about the new laptop I was getting and well, I have finally picked it up. I was surprised to see it in such a good condition, even though the charging cable does seem to be a bit iffy (it works, but I may have to get new one). The battery, as already expected, doesn't last a very long time (about an hour) and because of that, I have already ordered a new one (with over 8 Ah if I remember correctly) that should hopefully last a bit longer than the current one. It's one of these rather large ones that actually stick out from the back of the laptop, so that'll make this beast even heavier than it already is (2+ kg, which is about 5 lbs). But overall, I'm quite impressed by how well this laptop has been kept; there are no scratches, the display is _very_ clean, the keyboard is working fine — everything just seems to work.
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## OS and hardware stuff
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I wasn't entirely certain which OS to install yesterday but I opted to install Manjaro with i3-gaps, as I did not want to bother with Arch Linux today. The installation processes worked very smoothly — using Manjaro Architect — and I was up and running in about an hour; this is, however, mainly due to my rather slow internet connection. Manjaro i3 works very well on this machine and the processor and 2 GB of RAM seem to be adequate for running it rather well, too. Unfortunately, the video card does seem to struggle with compton providing transparency, so I had to turn that off.
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### RAM
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As mentioned earlier, this laptop comes with 2 GB of PC2-5300S RAM sticks installed, but, to _boost_ this machine slightly further, I have also ordered a new pair of 2 GB PC2-5300 RAM sticks running at 667 MHz — that will hopefully work in this machine —, which should bring the total amount of RAM up to 3 GB; and if you're wondering why 2 x 2 GB equals 3 GB, it's because, unfortunately, it seems that only 3 GB can actually be used by the chipset used in the processor of this laptop. As the article on [ThinkWiki](http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:T60#footnotes) puts it: —
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> "Due to an addressing limitation in the Intel 945PM and 945GM chipsets, only 3 GB will be available for use".
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I do, however, believe that 3 GB will be more than enough; heck, even 2 GB do the job just fine, but having an extra gigabyte isn't going to hurt, especially since these old RAM sticks don't really cost a lot of money any more (I paid €8, which includes shipping). They are supposed to arrive on Wednesday and I will create another blog post when they do.
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### HDD
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I was expressing my doubts regarding the size of the HDD yesterday and, as it turns out, it's actually an 80 GB which is perhaps _slightly_ less than what I had hoped for, but it's no big deal; I could always replace it with one of the other, larger HDDs that I have at home. I may even replace the HDD with an SSD, as I'm sure this would increase this device's performance immensely because the current HDD does seem to be a tad on the slower side.
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However, I was somewhat baffled to see that none of my screwdrivers would actually fit the screws used for keeping the RAM, the HDD etc. in place.
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I had imagined it to be a regular Philips head screwdriver, but it appears to be … something else — I am honestly not entirely certain what it's supposed to be.
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Therefore, I'll be taking it with me to work tomorrow to see if we have any kind of screwdriver there that would fit.
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### CPU
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The CPU seems to be a Intel Core 2 Duo of the Merom variety, clocking in at a _whopping_ 1.87 GHz per core. This is obviously nowhere near most modern CPUs, but I have found that it seems to be enough for most things that I do on a laptop — we will talk about some exceptions later on — and it usually only runs at 0 - 50% load most of the time. Upgrading the CPU does, however, seem possible and ThinkWiki lists the following CPUs which the laptop was shipped with: —
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> Intel Core Solo (Yonah) 2 MB L2-Cache T1300 (1,66 GHz), T1400 (1,83 GHz)
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> Intel Core Duo (Yonah) 2 MB L2-Cache T2300 (1,6 GHz), T2300E (1,66 GHz), T2400 (1,83 GHz), T2500 (2,0 GHz), T2600 (2,16 GHz), T2700 (2,33 GHz)
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> Intel Core 2 Duo (Merom) 2 MB L2-Cache T5500 (1,6 GHz), T5600 (1,83 GHz)
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> Intel Core 2 Duo (Merom) 4 MB L2-Cache T7200 (2,0 GHz), T7400 (2,16 GHz), T7600 (2,33 GHz)
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I therefore believe it should be possible to take out the Merom T5600 and instead opt to install the Merom T7600, which would give me approximately another GHz in total. I am still uncertain as to whether or not I will actually be doing this; it seems like a lot of work and I have my doubts as to whether the performance increase will be worth it; that being said, these old CPUs cost barely anything on eBay, so we'll see.
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### I hate the PC speaker
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Something that has always bothered me about PCs, especially older ones, is that they _beep all the time_. The PC
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speaker may be a nice thing for letting users know about very important events (such as a low battery), but I absolutely do not want my PC to beep my ears off whenever I type an invalid command or press `Backspace` when there's nothing to backspace. It even beeped at me when I pressed `Print` (or `Druck` on a German keyboard) for taking a screenshot!
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Therefore, I frequently disable the PC Speaker Kernel modules of my PCs by blacklisting them; this can be achieved by simply creating a new file inside `/etc/modprobe.d` called `name.conf` — wherein `name` can be replaced by anything you'd like — and adding the following line: `blacklist pcspkr`.
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I did the same during the installation of Manjaro, as it beeped at me all the time; there, however, I simply typed `sudo rmmod pcspkr` to disable it temporarily.
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It's also possible to disable the PC Speaker for certain function directly inside the BIOS which I have done as well; however, as I would like my laptop to notify me of a low battery, I opted to not completely disable it.
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### Battery
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I mentioned the rather abhorrent battery life earlier and wanted to share the output of `sudo tlp-stat --battery` with you, as it quite nicely shows how much charge the battery has lost over its lifetime: —
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```
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Charge
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= 81.7 [%]
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Capacity
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= 41.8 [%]
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```
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Looking at the battery itself, it turns out it used to have a capacity of approximately 4 Ah; as it currently only has around 40% of that remaining, that leaves us at a measly 1.6 Ah, or 1600 mAh. If you don't know what these numbers mean, let us compare this to the phone that I own, the Huawei Mate 20 Lite; this, in comparison, has a 3750 mAh (or 3.75 Ah) and lasts around a day or so. I thus strongly believe the new battery will last longer, considering it has five times the capacity of the one currently installed.
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### Power consumption
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Speaking about the battery, let's talk a bit about the overall power consumption of this machine; I have measured its power consumption using a Watt metre and it clocks in at around 15 to 60 W, depending on what's being done at the moment. I honestly find that a tad too high and, referring to ThinkWiki, it appears that the T60 had an idle power consumption of 12.7 W when tested with the 14" 1400x1050 14" display at minimum brightness.
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And even though I did not use minimum brightness when I tested the power consumption of my T60, I still believe that 20+ W idle is rather high.
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### Screen
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The screen has an aspect ratio of 4:3 and a resolution of 1024x768; I have not measured the size of the screen myself, but ThinkWiki says it's either 14.1" or 15", depending on the model. There exist some 16:10 ones as well, which I would've liked even more to be honest, but I am quite happy with the 4:3 version too. The brightness is decent-ish — not much different from most other laptops I've used —but not great for bright environments (like sitting outside in the sun).
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It's possible to set the screen brightness from `Normal` to `High` in the BIOS, but I have honestly been unable to find any difference between these two settings.
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### Temperature
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Seeing as this laptop is over a decade old, I would've thought it was going to run _really_ hot; but, surprisingly, the temperature has maxed out at 70°C whilst compiling a program (i. e. 100% load for 20 to 30 minutes) and usually runs at around 40°C - 50°C; now these are obviously not super cold, but all the ThinkPads I have used so far ran somewhat warmer and I therefore believe these temperatures are actually pretty standard for this type of laptop.
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However, even if they weren't, I don't see temperatures like these hurting the CPU at all. Should I see the temperatures rising more in the coming days or weeks, however, I will have to see if perhaps applying some new thermal paste would be in order.
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## Software
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As mentioned previously, most programs run quite well on this machine and I can even edit my book in LibreOffice without any lagging. The only thing that I had to disable was, as mentioned earlier, compton, but I can live with that. I use qutebrowser as my browser and that works rather well and pretty smooth as well — that is, unless you have more than five tabs open or if, God forbid, you try to watch YouTube; it definitely cannot handle YouTube videos — or well, it can, but you will not be able to set the resolution to anything north of 480p and even at that, your CPU will run at nigh full load.
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However, since most of the software I use on a day-to-day basis is in the terminal, it works very well. I have installed a couple of GUI programs (such as the aforementioned LibreOffice and Audacity for recording things off of my shortwave receiver) but these all work adequately as well.
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RAM does not tend to be an issue either (unless you're compiling something) and right now I am at 680 MB of RAM with qutebrowser (two tabs) and vim open and a jekyll server running in the background.
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## Conclusion
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All in all, I believe this a great work laptop, even to this day; the keyboard is fantastic to type on, I quite like the 4:3 screen and it only cost €25!
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---
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layout: post
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title: Adventures in setting up a T60 with a modern OS — Battery, driver issues and HDD
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---
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{:class="img-responsive"}
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## Battery
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The new battery for my T60 has finally arrived! I was very happy about the fact that it seems to look basically identical to the original battery and about it being quite powerful. From my, admittedly rather short testing, it seems that it will last around 2 - 3 hours when fully charged, which is plenty. I will be keeping the battery that came with the laptop as a spare, should I ever need one, though. I was surprised to see how light it was in comparison to the original Lenovo battery, even though it has much more capacity; but I won't complain about that.
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It does, as already expected, stick out slightly from the back of the laptop, but this isn't annoying in any way.
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Checking the output of `sudo tlp-stat --battery` again shows that the capacity of the old battery has dropped down to 34%.
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There were reports of the power supply getting hotter when using this battery, but I have honestly not noticed any of that. The power supply of these machines tend to get quite warm anyway; it's a common enough problem, but the power supplies' temperature tends to be still within tolerable levels.
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I was also quite surprised about its relatively quick arrival; I had ordered it at a rather prominent online store but was told that it was going to arrive on April 22nd, due to the current SARS-CoV-2019 outbreak. The new power supply that I have ordered elsewhere, however, has not yet arrived, despite me being told that it was going to be arriving today — but honestly, having the battery is more important anyway.
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## Drivers
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I had previously had some issues with my video drivers and it was entirely my fault; Manjaro has a great out-of-the-box support for the majority of video cards, but because I have issues I thought I would check out `mhwd` (Manjaro Hardware Detection) and see if there were any other drivers for me to install — and there were. Aside from the one that had already been installed, namely `video-linux` there were a bunch of others that could be installed as well: —
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```
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> 0000:00:02.0 (0300:8086:27a2) Display controller Intel Corporation:
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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NAME VERSION FREEDRIVER TYPE
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--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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video-linux 2018.05.04 true PCI
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video-modesetting 2020.01.13 true PCI
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video-vesa 2017.03.12 true PCI
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```
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Unfortunately for me, however, those that were _not_ installed seem to have been drivers that don't work very well with my video card, if at all. Thus, I've been experiencing very slow and laggy programs, more so than I had hoped. Luckily, I figured out the problem and by uninstalling the "_bad"_ drivers I managed to fix it. The result of this is that I can now actually browse the web very well without any lagging and even YouTube videos are playing nicely now.
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Additionally, this solves the problem of the display being quite _wonky_ after suspension; it used to have a strange y-axis offset whenever it would awaken from suspension which resulted in a black bar at the bottom of the screen and all programs being displayed "too high".
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### Temperature improvements due to drivers
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Another side-effect of installing the correct drivers is that the temperature of the machine has dropped quite significantly. Running the `sensors` command now yields the following output: —
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```
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cpitz-acpi-0
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Adapter: ACPI interface
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temp1: +43.0°C (crit = +127.0°C)
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temp2: +40.0°C (crit = +99.0°C)
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coretemp-isa-0000
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Adapter: ISA adapter
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Core 0: +40.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
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Core 1: +40.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
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```
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These temperatures are from regular usage, i. e. browsing the web, editing my blog etc. Earlier, however, these temperatures tended to quite quickly exceed 60°C and the idle temperature was at around 50 to 55°C. This, in return, has the additional benefit of the fans having to spin less and thus improving battery life. I have even seen the temperatures drop below 40°C, which I found very surprising.
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I honestly did not think that installing the wrong drivers could be so detrimental to the performance of one's PC, but I am glad that, using the correct drivers, I am finally able to use this machine even better than I was before.
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## Why is the RAM here?
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As I had mentioned in the previous post, I was unsure as to which kinds of screws were used for holding the laptop together, as I was unable to unscrew them using the screwdrivers I had at home; and, as it turns out, it _was_ a Phillips head, just an even smaller one than the one I had at home, it seems. However, I was finally able to find out where the RAM is located — and I was quite honestly very surprised about its location, because it's actually located underneath the TouchPad! Thus, to get to it, you will need to unscrew four screws on the back of the laptop and actually take off the palm rest — and be careful while doing so, as the cable attaching the touchpad to the interior of the laptop can quite easily be ripped off.
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My main question, however, is why the RAM is located in such an awkward place; I'm sure it could've been possible to place it somewhere that wouldn't require you to basically take apart the palm rest.
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Regardless of that, I have yet to receive my new RAM sticks; they may arrive today and if they do, I will create a new blog post about them in particular.
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## More HDD information
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I was also curious to find out more about the hard drive installed on this machine and installed `smartmontools` which is used to show an HDDs information if it uses S.M.A.R.T. `smartmontools` can be found in the official Manjaro `extra` repositories or in the AUR.
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Well, as it turns out, this HDD is actually nigh collapse… and I don't think I should be too surprised about that. The output of `sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda` (wherein `/dev/sda` is my HDD) shows how badly it's doing:
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```
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D# ATTRIBUTE_NAME VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE RAW_VALUE
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1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 100 100 062 Pre-fail 0
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2 Throughput_Performance 105 105 040 Pre-fail 4577
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3 Spin_Up_Time 253 253 033 Pre-fail 0
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4 Start_Stop_Count 100 100 000 Old_age 991
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5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 100 100 005 Pre-fail 0
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7 Seek_Error_Rate 100 100 067 Pre-fail 0
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8 Seek_Time_Performance 122 122 040 Pre-fail 39
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9 Power_On_Hours 094 094 000 Old_age 2921
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10 Spin_Retry_Count 100 100 060 Pre-fail 0
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12 Power_Cycle_Count 100 100 000 Old_age 921
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191 G-Sense_Error_Rate 100 100 000 Old_age 0
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192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 100 100 000 Old_age 1626996769
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193 Load_Cycle_Count 089 089 000 Old_age 114263
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194 Temperature_Celsius 157 157 000 Old_age 35 (Min/Max 1/46)
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196 Reallocated_Event_Count 100 100 000 Old_age 0
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197 Current_Pending_Sector 100 100 000 Old_age 0
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198 Offline_Uncorrectable 100 100 000 Old_age 0
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199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 200 253 000 Old_age 0
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```
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There is a large amount of `Old_age` or `Pre-fail` types and nothing seems to be okay; this may actually be on of the reasons for this laptop being so slow at times, despite the processor not being too terrible. And while I'd hate having to set up everything again, I don't think I will be getting around doing that because this hard drive is quite clearly going to die _very_ soon.
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And because I thought I might as well go _all out_ if I do, I have ordered a 128 GB SSD online that will hopefully arrive on Friday. I have never actually used an SSD in any of my computers, but it's quite noticeable that this hard drive has seen its best days already.
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I also believe this may increase the performance because of the low amount of RAM; as this laptop only supports 3 GB of RAM, it will frequently have to use its swap drive and if that is running on this very old and slow HDD, I can see how it would make the laptop basically unusable.
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Although, I must be honest, it does surprise me slightly; the `Power_On_Hours` is only at `2921` which is a _very_ low value; I'm not quite sure why the HDD would be near failure after such a short amount of time.
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---
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layout: post
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title: Adventures in setting up a T60 with a modern OS — RAM, TrackPoint and Vifm and Escape
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---
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{:class="img-responsive"}
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In this post we'll be discussing the new RAM that has arrived, the new file manager I've started using and a few other things.
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## RAM
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{:class="img-responsive"}
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The new RAM finally arrived yesterday and I was quick to try and install it; however, to my dismay, it seemed to not like — at least at first. Initially, I had removed both of the old RAM sticks and replaced them with the new ones; this, however, resulted in my ThinkPad throwing an error at me, namely beeping. The ThinkPad has a bunch of beep codes that play whenever something is wrong, and I got `short short short short` which basically means that something is wrong with the RAM. I thus decided to take one of the RAM sticks out of the machine and put back one of the old ones and — voilà, it works. For some reason, it can only take 3 GB of RAM; and whilst I knew that only 3 GB could actually be addressed by the processor's chipset, I was unaware of the fact that it cannot even handle 4 GB of RAM installed. Everything I've read about this laptop indicated that 4 GB could be installed but, of those, only 3 GB could be used. The German ThinkWiki puts it as follows: —
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> Maximal sind 4 GB (2x2 GB) möglich, wobei jedoch nur 3 GB vom Chipsatz angesprochen werden können. Bei eingebauten 4 GB laufen die genutzten 2x1,5 GB im Dualchannel-Modus.
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This tells me that you can install a maximum of 4 GB of RAM (two 2 GB RAM sticks) whereof only 3 GB can be addressed; this seems to not be true, unfortunately.
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This leaves me with the slight annoyance of having two differently sized RAM sticks installed in my machine; luckily, however, this is the maximum amount of RAM supported anyway, so it's not like I'm missing out on anything.
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### Browsing with more RAM
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Now that I have more RAM, browsing the web has become much more bearable and having several tabs open at once is no longer a problem; and, due to the very lightweight nature of the OS + WM combination I am using (Manjaro with i3-gaps), the operating system only needs about 250 MB of RAM, so roughly 1.75 GB are free for other programs.
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## TrackPad speed
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I am someone who likes their TrackPad, TouchPad and mouse to be quite sensitive; I'm unsure how anyone can endure having to have a 1 km² table to move from one end of the desktop to the other — obviously I am exaggerating, but I cannot for the life of me stand low sensitivity mouse input. Thus, it was imperative for me to increase the speed of my TouchPad but unfortunately I was not sure how this can be done on i3wm; so I did a bit of searching and found the following command, wherein the 0 can be replaced by a number:
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```
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xinput set-prop "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint" "libinput Accel Speed" +0
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```
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I found that, for me personally, a speed of `+0.3` works great, so adding the following line to my i3 config will automatically set the TouchPad speed upon starting i3-gaps: –
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```
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#Changing TrackPoint sensitivity
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exec --no-startup-id xinput set-prop "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint" "libinput Accel Speed" +0
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```
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The name of your TouchPad or TrackPoint (which, in my case, is `TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint`) can be found by running the `xinput` command on its own and looking at the output: —
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```
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⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
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⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
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⎜ ↳ TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint id=10 [slave pointer (2)]
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⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
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↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
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↳ Power Button id=6 [slave keyboard (3)]
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↳ Video Bus id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
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↳ Sleep Button id=8 [slave keyboard (3)]
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↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=9 [slave keyboard (3)]
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↳ ThinkPad Extra Buttons id=11 [slave keyboard (3)]
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```
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## Remapping the Escape key
|
||||
This is something I've been meaning to do for quite a while now — remapping the Escape key. I've not yet done so as the Escape key on most keyboards was in a decent position; on the T60 keyboard, however, it's very high up, above the `F1` key. This results in my frequently pressing `F1` instead of Escape, and you really have to do some finger gymnastics to actually reach that Escape key. Thus, I decided to remap the Escape key to Caps Lock on my T60 and I've achieved that by adding the following to my i3 config: —
|
||||
|
||||
```
|
||||
#Remapping Caps Lock to Escape
|
||||
exec "setxkbmap -option caps:escape"
|
||||
```
|
||||
|
||||
This has made editing in Vim — and just general computer stuff — much easier.
|
||||
|
||||
## Vifm
|
||||
I have also abandoned ranger as my file manager and moved over to vifm. The main reasons for that are that vifm seems to be more lightweight, it's written in C (so it's faster than ranger, which was written in Python) and it uses the Vim keybindings all over. Additionally, you can add image, pdf (and other files) previews using [Überzug](https://github.com/seebye/ueberzug), which provides image previews that are _soo_ much better than those of w3mimgdisplay; those tend to be very iffy and don't often work correctly. This is especially true when using the terminal emulator I use, namely [suckless' st (simple terminal)](https://st.suckless.org/), because the image previews barely work at all in that terminal, especially when using transparency.
|
||||
Vifm on its own doesn't have any icons, which I like, but it's a feature that can very easily be patched in by adding a few lines to the vifm config file (`~/.config/vifm/vifmrc`).
|
||||
|
||||
The speed increase is especially noticeable on an old machine like the T60: ranger takes 1-5 seconds to open and vifm opens up almost instantaneously. It may not be as noticeable on more powerful machines, but I believe that, even there, the difference would be big enough to be noticeable. I have yet to install vifm on my main computer and my other laptop, but I will and see if the speed increase is noticeable there as well.
|
||||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,54 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
layout: post
|
||||
title: Adventures in setting up a T60 with a modern OS — SSD, more TrackPoint stuff and WiFi
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
In this post we'll be discussing the new SSD that I have installed into the computer and some more improvements that I have done to that TrackPoint.
|
||||
|
||||
## SSD
|
||||
The SSD I ordered has finally arrived and I obviously had to start testing it out immediately; I removed the old HDD from the laptop, replaced it with the SSD, ran the installation process again and immediately noticed improvements.
|
||||
First of all, the installation process finished in a much shorter time than it did before and even though this may have partly been because of a faster internet connection at work, I found the installation of the programs themselves — in addition to the downloads — finished much more quickly.
|
||||
Additionally, starting up the operating system after the installation had finished took such a short amount of time, I was honestly very surprised. I was used to having to wait for 30 to 40 seconds until the login screen appeared, but with the SSD installed it happened much more quickly; and to find out _how_ much quicker it booted, I ran `systemd-analyze` which provides information regarding the startup time: —
|
||||
|
||||
```
|
||||
Startup finished in 2.162s (kernel) + 7.801s (userspace) = 9.963s
|
||||
graphical.target reached after 6.720s in userspace
|
||||
```
|
||||
|
||||
As you can see, the bootup time this time around was below 10 seconds! I honestly did not believe the improvement could be this dramatic, especially since I had never used an SSD before — and these aren't even the only improvements.
|
||||
In addition to the much speedier startup, programs also start (and install) much more quickly. Chromium usually took around 5 to 15 seconds to start up with the old HDD, but it starts up within 3 seconds now. In addition, when installing a new package using `yay` or `pacman`, it took quite a while for the initial `:: Checking for conflicts...`, `:: Checking for inner conflicts...`,`resolving dependencies...` and `looking for conflicting packages...` commands to complete; this now takes less than a second, whereas before I frequently had to wait 30+ seconds for this to finish.
|
||||
|
||||
This whole ordeal has made me want to buy some SSDs for my remaining PCs to improve their speed even further; but I'm thus far not entirely sure whether the money will be worth it, as I believe they are running quickly enough already. The main reason I bought an SSD for this laptop is that it desperately needed a new drive — as was evident by the S.M.A.R.T sensor output I showed in an earlier post — and because I — seemingly correctly — believed that it would greatly improve the speed of this laptop and I thought it would be the best upgrade short of actually replacing the CPU.
|
||||
|
||||
## TrackPoint seizures
|
||||
I love the TrackPoint — but it doesn't seem to love me. Recently I found out that the mouse cursor would frequently continue moving, even though I had already let go of it; it doesn't move quickly, but it moves enough to be noticeable and a tad annoying.
|
||||
Interestingly enough, whilst browsing the Subreddit /r/ThinkPad, I stumpled upon a post detailing this exact issue — and it contained a possible fix in the comments.
|
||||
Apparently, a while back a fix has been added to the Linux Kernel by Reddit user /u/lihaarp which basically allows one to set the so-called "drift time" to a different value which apparently fixes this strange problem; apparently it is now possible to change the drift time inside `/sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/drift_time`. The `serio2` directory unfortunately does not exist on my system, but the `drift_time` file can still be found inside the `serio1` directory.
|
||||
He mentioned that creating a `udev` rule allows you to have this done on start-up, but I, unfortunately, do not know anything about `udev`; thus, for now, I have decided to add the following to my i3 config: —
|
||||
|
||||
```
|
||||
#No more drifting
|
||||
echo 25 > /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/drift_time
|
||||
```
|
||||
|
||||
Running this command does appear to mitigate the problem of the random cursor drifing and I'm quite happy about the fact that I was able to find a very simple fix for this, admittedly, only slightly annoying problem.
|
||||
|
||||
## WiFi
|
||||
This laptop is obviously quite old — when it was released, I was still in primary school (≈ 2007) — so it isn't surprising that the WiFi card wouldn't support a lot of modern standards. But firstly, let us find the WiFi card by running `lspci | grep -i wireless` which yields the following: —
|
||||
|
||||
```
|
||||
03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan] Network Connection (rev 02)
|
||||
```
|
||||
|
||||
I was actually surprised by the fact that it supports 5 GHz networks, albeit at a rather slow speed. I am currently sitting directly in front of an AVM Fritz!Box 7490 — AVM is a German producer of very high-end networking equipment — and the bitrate of my connection is at a relatively low 54 Mbit/s.
|
||||
I therefore decided to look up the data sheet of that card and found out that, indeed, the highest bitrate supported by it is 54 Mbit/s. This is because this actually just supports the following WiFi standards: `802.11a/b/g` whereas fastest standard at the moment is `802.11n`. It seems that a `802.11n` capable WiFi card actually _was_ shipped with the T60 at some point, but it's obvious that it's included in the one I have.
|
||||
Luckily, however, it does have Gigabit Ethernet, so should I ever have a very fast internet connection — like I do at work — I can simply connect it to a router via LAN and download stuff that way; and, to be honest, 54 Mbit/s is plenty and I don't usually need more than that anyway.
|
||||
Confirming that I do indeed have the `802.11a/b/g` adapter can also be achieved by using `iwconfig`: —
|
||||
|
||||
```
|
||||
IEEE 802.11 ESSID:"FRITZ!Box 7490"
|
||||
Mode:Managed Frequency:5.26 GHz Access Point: CC:CE:1E:6A:81:49
|
||||
Bit Rate=54 Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm
|
||||
```
|
||||
|
||||
As this output clearly shows, I get a bitrate of 54 Mbit/s even though I am literally just 10 cm away from the router. My phone shows a bitrate of 400 Mbit/s.
|
||||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,63 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
layout: post
|
||||
title: Adventures in setting up a T60 with a modern OS — YouTube, noises and screen locking
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
This is just a quick post wherein I would like to talk about how it's possible to watch YouTube without lagging or high CPU usage on such an old machine; I will talk about some strange noises coming from the PC; and I will talk about some issues I had with screen locking.
|
||||
|
||||
## YouTube
|
||||
Let's start off by examining the main reason for the high CPU usage of YouTube videos: the player. The YouTube video player has _always_ been horrendous when it comes to CPU usage and this problem was quite evident back in the day for me, as I used to have a rather slow computer; it could handle Full-HD video just fine, but watching YouTube in Full-HD or even 720p was impossible and whilst this problem mostly doesn't bother modern PC users due to their usually relatively high CPU and also GPU performance, it does matter on an old machine such as this one.
|
||||
|
||||
Thus, I decided it was time to do something about it and I downloaded `youtube-dl` which is a small, Terminal-based program that can download and convert YouTube videos in addition to `mpv` which is a nice multimedia player. `mpv` actually has the ability to play YouTube videos if you give it a YouTube URL, so I created a small setting in my i3 config that simply copies what I have in my clipboard (for example a YouTube video) and uses that as the argument for mpv. The line that I added to my config is as follows:
|
||||
|
||||
```
|
||||
bindsym $mod+y --release exec --no-startup-id "mpv `xclip -o`"
|
||||
```
|
||||
|
||||
This allows me to open YouTube, copy the URL of a video I'd like to watch and simply press `Windows Key + Y`; this will result in `mpv` opening said video and playing it.
|
||||
|
||||
However, `mpv` usually plays videos at their highest available resolution which is obviously not needed on a display that has a resolution of 1024 x 768; therefore, I added the following line to my `mpv.conf`: —
|
||||
|
||||
```
|
||||
ytdl-format=bestvideo[height<?720]+bestaudio/best
|
||||
```
|
||||
|
||||
This will select a resolution below 720p, i.e. 240p - 480p; the argument inside the brackets could be change to `[height<=?720]` to also allow 720p resolutions to play.
|
||||
|
||||
### Where is the `mpv.conf`?
|
||||
You may be wondering where the configuration file is located and I too had the problem of not being able to find it at first; I therefore ran `sudo find / -name mpv.conf` and the following was returned: `/usr/share/doc/mpv/mpv.conf`. I hence created a new folder inside my `.config` folder by typing `mkdir -p ~/.config/mpv/` and by then copying the config file from `/usr/shrae/doc/` to my `~/.config` directory by typing `cp /usr/share/doc/mpv/mpv.conf/ ~/.config/mpv/`.
|
||||
|
||||
## Strange noises
|
||||
Recently, I started hearing strange noises coming from the computer and I was quite honestly quite concerened that they would indicate an impeding failure; however, it luckily does not seem to be that way.
|
||||
|
||||
I started hearing these noises and at first I believed they were coming from the hard drive; but considering the fact that I no longer have an HDD inside this computer, it must've been something else. I hence put my ear towards the laptop and started listening and found out that the noises seem to be originiating from the RAM / CPU. Additionally, they seem to react to activity on my computer, such as moving the mouse or installing something.
|
||||
|
||||
Being obviously concerned, I did some googling and stumpled upon a [very helpful page on the ThinkWiki](http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_high_pitch_noises) which details the same noise problems that I have been having and I have narrowed it down to CPU power saving states. It appears that the "extreme" power saving modes `C3` and `C4` trigger the noise and this does seem to be the problem with me as well; When plugged into AC power, the noise does not appear, but when running on battery power it is very noticeable.
|
||||
|
||||
There are a handful of fixes, such as straight-up disabling these power saving CPU states, but they come at the cost of reduced battery life. Undervolting the processor seems to be a possible solution as well, but I am somewhat afraid of doing that.
|
||||
|
||||
There are also some people that this may be related to the microphone, something that, to me, sounds utterly ridiculous, but I will keep my eyes open and see if that could possibly fix it.
|
||||
|
||||
As these noises don't bother me too much, however, I will be ignoring them for now; I was simply concerned they could indicate an underlying problem with the computer.
|
||||
|
||||
## Screen locking
|
||||
Another thing that I noticed on all my Manjaro i3 installations is that, when closing the laptop lid, the computer goes into suspension, but does not lock the screen; this results in me being able to open the laptop back up without needing to enter a password and I find that very insecure.
|
||||
|
||||
Thus, I looked around the internet and found a fix for it; you simply need to create your own `systemd` service and place it in `/etc/systemd/system`. I have created a `blurlock.service` with the following content, wherein `sophon` is my user name and needs to be replaced according to your local installation: —
|
||||
|
||||
```
|
||||
[Unit]
|
||||
Description=blurlock on suspend
|
||||
Before=sleep.target
|
||||
|
||||
[Service]
|
||||
user=sophon
|
||||
Type=forking
|
||||
Environment=DISPLAY=:0
|
||||
ExecStart=/usr/bin/blurlock -time 1
|
||||
|
||||
[Install]
|
||||
WantedBy=sleep.target
|
||||
```
|
||||
|
||||
This will automatically lock the screen when you suspend the laptop.
|
||||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,16 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
layout: post
|
||||
title: Update on my book — First version finished
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
Some may be aware of the fact that I started writing a book regarding the language of Ancient Egypt quite a while ago and, due to work, have taken much longer than anticipated to actually finish it. However, I have finally been able to finish my book and you may now download it freely on my website.
|
||||
|
||||
In addition, I have commissioned the first pre-print of my book a few days ago which includes three copies which will be given to some family members and friends.
|
||||
If these copies turn out to my liking, I will be proof-reading _once more_ and thereafter print a few more versions.
|
||||
|
||||
I am, however, still undecisive regarding the publishing of my book; I am still thinking of actually self-publishing it via epubli, yet I am unsure whether I should really be doing that.
|
||||
There are numerous reasons for me not wanting to do it, but suffice it to say that I find it rather difficult to decide. Therefore, if you wish to obtain a physical copy of the book — and you're more than welcome to request one —, you may do so by simply sending me an email; therein we will negotiate a price for shipping and the book itself. Please be patient, however, as printing these books can take a while and, should I not have any in stock, having them printed and arrive at my door may take up to two weeks.
|
||||
|
||||
Over the upcoming weeks and months, there will definitely be updates to the book, mostly regarding spelling errors or better wording; however, I have started on a new project now, which is regarding the Inferno operating system created by Bell Labs in the mid-1990s and as I wanted to write something different to what most other people writing about Inferno did, I have decided to write it in an _old fashion_, i.e. using perhaps some outdated words and sentence constructions. This was done in order to engage the reader more, as reading a very dryly written book on Inferno will most likely not interest the majority of people. Instead, my book is supposed to read akin to an old type of, perhaps, adventure book, or a book detailing a journey; this is because I believe discovering Inferno and its different functions and programs can be likened to a journey.
|
||||
|
||||
Please check back here and on my website from time to time to receive updates regarding the book and other interesting subjects.
|
||||
|
|
@ -4,15 +4,3 @@
|
|||
|
||||
layout: home
|
||||
---
|
||||
<h1>All posts</h1>
|
||||
<hr>
|
||||
|
||||
{% for collection in site.collections %}
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
{% for item in site[collection.label] %}
|
||||
<h2><a href="{{ item.url }}">{{ item.title }} </a></h2>
|
||||
<p class="post-excerpt">{{ item.content | truncate: 200 }}</p>
|
||||
<hr>
|
||||
{% endfor %}
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
{% endfor %}
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
|
|
@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
|
|||
---
|
||||
# Feel free to add content and custom Front Matter to this file.
|
||||
# To modify the layout, see https://jekyllrb.com/docs/themes/#overriding-theme-defaults
|
||||
|
||||
layout: home
|
||||
---
|
||||
<h1>All posts</h1>
|
||||
<hr>
|
||||
|
||||
{% for collection in site.collections %}
|
||||
<p>
|
||||
{% for item in site[collection.label] %}
|
||||
<h2><a href="{{ item.url }}">{{ item.title }} </a></h2>
|
||||
<p class="post-excerpt">{{ item.content | truncate: 200 }}</p>
|
||||
<hr>
|
||||
{% endfor %}
|
||||
</p>
|
||||
{% endfor %}
|
||||
Loading…
Reference in New Issue