From phr2004-nospam Sat Nov 20 11:47:54 -0800 2004 Subject: thinkpad x40, part 1 From: Paul Rubin Reply-to: Paul Rubin [Note: my email address is removed to foil spammers. Non-spammers can leave me a message at that url should they so desire. --Paul] My X40 came and it's on my lap powered off right now. I got it from an Ebay dealer using Buy It Now for $1299. My setup is like this one: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6724032746 Although the guy puts a few of them them per week up for auction starting at $1249 and I might have been able to get one for that price if I waited long enough, I was missing having a computer so I paid the extra $50 to get it a week or two earlier. I also paid $25 extra for second day shipping so I'd be able to pick it up today instead of next week. I also got the X4 Ultrabase dock, $149 extra, more about which below. In conjunction with this, I ordered a Fedora Core 3 DVD-R from cheapbytes.com which ran around $12 with shipping. That beats trying to download 8 cd's worth of files. Finally I got a Mack International 3 year computer warranty ($59.99) from the laptop seller. The refurb laptop has 1 year of IBM warranty and the Mack warranty will cover repair costs til 4 years from now. I think this is worth it. I've had many laptops fail in the 3rd or 4th year of service, though those were machines I used heavily. This one may get lighter use and hold up better. As you can see from the ebay post, my X40 has a 1.2 ghz Pentium-M (Centrino), Intel 802.11-b internal mini-pci wifi card, 512mb ram, 40gb disk, 8 cell (extended) battery, and supposedly came in a sealed box (see below). It will supposedly run 6 hours on this battery. The standard battery has 4 cells (half the runtime) and is smaller, but the dealer doesn't sell those. I decided before I bought it that since this is an ultraportable, I probably wanted the extended battery anyway (I hardly ever run my big laptop on battery power but this is different). The X40 is supposedly the smallest laptop every made with a full sized keyboard. The keyboard is indeed pretty good, though they did shrink some of the larger non-alphabetic keys like "enter" and "caps lock". I put the X40 next to my no-longer-functioning Thinkpad 240 which has a fairly useable keyboard that's about 90% of standard size. The X40 is very slightly wider and deeper (maybe 1/4" each direction) but might be a tiny bit thinner. Since the X40 has a 12.1" screen and the 240 has 10.4", the extra screen area is worth the slightly increased box size all by itself. The X40 generally feels about the same size as the 240 even though direct comparison shows the X40 is a little larger. The 8 cell battery sticks out the back by an extra inch or so and looks a little kludgy. It adds close to 1/2 pound to the weight (2.8 lb with standard battery, 3.2 with extended, I think). If I were doing it again, I'd think of getting the standard battery, mostly because the extended one looks weird sticking out the back, like it might snag on something. Stay tuned for part II... From phr2004-nospam Sat Nov 20 16:15:20 -0800 2004 Subject: thinkpad x40, part II From: Paul Rubin Reply-to: Paul Rubin The X4 Ultrabase is a plastic baseplate that clips onto the bottom of the X40. It's the same width and depth as the X40 and about 0.8" thick and it's remarkably lightweight. It adds serial and parallel ports and an Ultrabay to the X40. An Ultrabay is a slot that can hold a CD or DVD drive, a second HDD, or a second battery. The X40 with the base attached and a CD or DVD drive installed is still a pretty small machine and under 5 pounds. The X40 and the base stay together as a solid unit, no extra boxes or cables, so it's a nice setup. IIRC, the Ultrabay was introduced with the Thinkpad 770 in the late 90's (a large, desktop-replacement style laptop). I had one of those. Later I got the A20p (another big laptop), which had an upgraded but incompatible version called Ultrabay 2000. My A20p came with an Ultrabay 2000 DVD reader (not burner) and I bought a CD burner for it (the CD burner, like others of that era, doesn't read DVD's). I also bought an 2nd HDD adapter ($50) that lets me put a 2nd HD in the A20p, but I had trouble getting the Linux kernel to recognize it, and I never really needed it so I never got it working. I had somehow had the impression that the X4 Ultrabase for the X40 accepted Ultrabay 2000 devices and therefore I could install my CD burner, DVD reader, and hard drive adapter in it (not simultaneously). As mentioned, I ordered a DVD-R disc with Fedora Core 3 at the same time that I ordered the laptop, and the disc was there waiting for me when I picked the laptop up. The X40 has Windoze XP preinstalled but I had no interest in that. I dug out my Ultrabay 2000 DVD drive eager to install it in the X4 Ultrabase and perform an immediate inverse defenestration (that means throwing windows out of a computer). Guess what? It wouldn't fit!!! It was a few mm too thick, and the connector was different. Turns out the X4 Ultrabase uses yet another incompatible Ultrabay form factor, called "Ultrabay Slim", which has apparently been used in the past few generations of T series Thinkpads as well. Grrr!!! So I can't use my existing drives in it. If I'd known that, I probably wouldn't have bought it. It's not useless, since I can get an Ultrabay Slim HDD adapter for $40, and I want to get a DVD burner when they make one that writes 8.5GB dual layer DVD+R (right now they have a 4.7GB +/- R/RW burner available but no dual layer, and the one they have is pretty expensive). Having an internal burner in one's laptop is really nice. The 2nd HDD adapter also sounds worthwhile, since the X40's internal drive is a 1.8" unit (smaller than standard 2.5" laptop drives) and 40GB is the maximum capacity available. 2.5" drives are available up to 100 GB, and I think some 120 GB have been announced. But for now, I need to find some other way to do the install, maybe by putting the DVD into my A20p and then doing a network installation. Another idea is to buy a full sized external USB2 DVD burner (I want a DVD burner one way or another) and install that way. I actually have a USB2 hard drive enclosure and an old Maxtor drive with Red Hat 7 (?) installed, so I might try booting from that and see what happened. Meanwhile, I went ahead and booted the XP preinstall. I expected some obnoxious EULA but in fact there was none. The preinstall doesn't seem to have been completely installed, either--it comes up in some state where the configuration isn't complete, and it doesn't find the laptop's sound card. I guess I'm not too worried since I want to trash XP as soon as I can anyway. But I'd hoped to at least try out the built-in wi-fi, which uses the Intel chip that Linux doesn't support (I'm going to have to use a PC card to use wi-fi with Linux on this machine, or get the fancier Atheros a/b/g internal card which has a semi-reverse-engineered Linux driver). Stay tuned for part III... From phr2004-nospam Sun Nov 21 20:03:19 -0800 2004 Subject: thinkpad x40, part III From: Paul Rubin Reply-to: Paul Rubin [ Note: previous installments are webbed at: http://www.nightsong.com/phr/x40-mail.txt ] Where was I. Oh yes, I tried booting XP and it came up with no EULA, in what turned out to be the XP System Preparation tool or something like that. A thing that lets XP vendors put together customized disk images for replication onto multiple machines. I noticed a few other weird things too, like the audio device didn't work, and I didn't see any of the special Thinkpad utilities that other Thinkpads I've bought came with. It looks to me like somebody installed a generic XP distribution onto the X40 overwriting the IBM preinstall. The X40 also comes with a recovery partition (what they use now instead of CD)'s, and the partition was there, but was somehow disabled, so the instructions for how to boot and reinstall from it didn't work. I called Thinkpad tech support and they checked out a few things and told me this. I asked about buying recovery CD's and they said I could order a set for $45. I told them I'd hold off on it for now. I didn't really want to run XP anyway, and who knows if some of that $45 is going to Microsoft? It's bad enough to pay for the damn spawnware once, much less twice. So I was back to figuring out how to install Linux. Last week I bought a cheapass 3.5" USB2 external HD enclosure partly for this purpose and partly to back up the files on my A20p. (The A20p has only USB 1.1, not USB2, so I could either get a USB2 Cardbus card for it, or simply accept the USB 1.1 speed restriction and let it spend several hours backing up the 15 GB or so of files that I have on it). And about four years ago I bought a 60 GB Maxtor Diamondmax IDE disk for no particularly good reason. I ended up installing RH8 (or maybe it was RH9) on my seldom-used 333 mhz AMD K6 desktop boatanchor, but hardly using it. So I stuck that drive into the external enclosure figuring it may not have the latest OS, but at least I could boot from it and try out the X40. Nope. Turning on the drive started making a weird repetitious thunking noise sort of like my old IBM Travelstar now-unuseable drive. It's possible that the cheap enclosure isn't giving it enough power, but also possible that the drive has stopped working over 4 years of sitting in a box in my room (it has less than a few dozen runtime hours on it, mostly undemanding). That bodes rather poorly for the notion of using an HD as a backup device anyway. I started thinking about Roland's suggestion of a network boot. I didn't realize at the time that the boot target was simply an ISO image. My only machine with a DVD reader is my A20p, so I'd have to install the DVD reader, get the network listener running, and (I thought maybe) unpack the distro and get the files into some suitable shape on the filesystem. Screw that. I went to CompUSA and bought a Mad Dog Multimedia 16x external USB2 DVD +/- R/RW reader/burner with 8.5GB DVD+RW/DL support for $149.95, a pretty good deal if you ask me. They had an 8x version for $129.95 but I saw that the store actually has some 16x discs available now ($2+ each!) so I sprung for the 16x burner (plus a spindle of 8x blanks). I always wanted a DVD burner. I plugged it into the X40, set the bios config to boot from external CD, and to my surprise the installation went completely smoothly. It was MUCH better, and faster, than multi-cd installs that I've done in the past. The DVD burner supposedly reads recordable DVD's at 16x, which in CD-ROM terms is around 144x. In practice, I saw the FC3 packages installing at around 1 MB/sec give or take. The complete install took about 15 minutes, instead of hours. A little bit of grovelling over the ifcfg scripts got the ADSL pppoe connection working so that's what I'm typing on now. Inverse defenstration accomplished!!! There's only one known problem, which is that the sound doesn't work--the sound system recognizes the internal card and the configuration looks correct, but I don't hear anything from the speaker or headphones. I'll have to keep investigating this. Stay tuned for part IV...