What is on Your Mind?

Without OS: good to know that these are still for sale, although intermittently and usually only in specialised outfits.

Just wanted to tell you that today my all new woderful notebook arrived (thanks again, Ygor - great tip!). I had to make some small adjustments and probably you are interested in my experiences, so here we go:

The original plan was to buy a I5 system, because i have no performance problems at all. Shortly after placing the order the dealer called to tell me that with a 2-core processor the system only knows about 8GB RAM. Well, he gave a special price for the upgrade and i can't bring myself to be disappointed about having more processing power now than perhaps i ever will need (i wonder when i ever will grow up and buy only what i need, not what is cool, hip and fast - *sigh*).

Anyway, this was my final system, which came for a price of EUR 3113,-, including VAT:

HP Elitebook Mobile Workstation 8740W
non-glare WUXGA display 1920x1200
Intel I7-740QM
16GB DDR-3 RAM PC10600 CL9
ATI Fire graphics, 1GB local memory
256GB Crucial C300 SSD

My first impression was very good: it looks very solid, is less noisy than my old notebook (a HP Pavilion dv7) and compared to the closed-shop BIOS of its predecessor the BIOS is filled with options.

The old one had a "BIOS tuning program" or something such instead - which ran exclusively under Windoze, naturally. Thank you for nothing! I don't want to install a complete OS every time i want to change the boot order.

Anyway, the new thing looks a lot more professional - built for work, not for watching videos while archiving last holidays photos.

I put in an old Ubuntu 9.04 CD i happen to find in my - well, you really don't want to see my software archive, LOL - and try to start up. The displays resolution and quality is breathtaking and i had to take some time just to look at this absolutely phantastic screen. I'm really looking forward to work with this baby.

The downside is that no network is working: there is no WLAN device, suggesting that i have to find the right driver module, but even eth0 is missing and i can't configure a cable-bound network. The output of "ifconfig" only shows 2 devices, "lo0" and "pan0", i don't know what to make of that.

Well, let's see what an up-to-date Fedora version (15) can do with the hardware, so i am downloading the installation DVD right now (3.3GB - that takes a while). I will tell you tomorrow what happened.

bakunin

3113 Euros? That's $4386. Holy Cow!

Don't let the airport goons drop it. They'll just say, "Oh, sorry. Move along."

$4,437 USD by my currency converter app!

Wow! I thought I paid a lot for my fully upgraded MacBook Air, which was around $2,000 USD including Singapore GST (Tax), which I thought was too much, LOL.

EDIT: On the other hand, I still can't get my MBA to recognize my Galaxy S running Android 2.2 as a USB mass storage device (MSD) despite trying every solution Google searches can offer. Beware Android users! Apple does not play well with Androids!

It is a sad story that for electronic gadgets 1$=1EUR if not even worse. Try shopping for a MacBook Air with 4GB RAM, the faster 2.13GHz processor and the "Apple Super Drive" (whatever this is). At the US store (Apple) it is priced $ 1878,-, the same system at the german store (Apple) is EUR 1868,-. For HP and all the other big players it is pretty much the same picture.

Still, i didn't want to order in the US because customs can be a bit tricky and if something goes wrong claiming warranty overseas is some work.

My smartphone currency converter app is "near real time" and pulls down bank rates on demand.

At this moment, it shows 1 Euro equals 1.4239 USD.

... so I think in the days of Internet connectivity by smartphones, most have accurate currency conversion apps.

Now, I checked the rate is: 1 Euro = 1.41400 U.S. dollars, market has changed since I started writing this post, or I forgot to force update since yesterday when I was working cross-currency on something.

I managed to get Fedora 15 to run, at least in text mode. Even the network device eth0 was there without intervention on my part, only the WLAN was not working. I also tried Xubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal), which is working fine from a USB stick once i figured out that the USB 3.0 slots give troubles booting from a stick attached to one of them. Once i understood this i used the USB 2.0 slot and had no troubles at all. Still, installing X.org's Xserver to the minimal Fedora installation did not work and searching the net i found only little information about the configuration of the ATI FirePro card (none of it at AMDs/ATIs website, naturally - non-Windows-users deserve to get no support at all, *grrrr*). But as Xubuntu is working somehow i suppose it will be just a matter of time until i figure out how to coerce a native Xserver to cooperation.

Anyways, the last few days i had some other things to do and was not able to work much on the new system, which left me with some time to think over what i want to do. Here is my current plan:

I would like to have two different Linux installations at the "base level", because if one breaks i want to have the other one ready to revive it. I want only the barest minimum installed in these systems, all the really fancy stuff should go to virtual machines running on top of these two. It is a lot easier to clone/restore virtual systems than it is to do so with physical ones.

I want a /home filesystem which i can mount to any of the systems running, so that i can share all the user data between all the systems.

Here is my proposed disk layout:

/dev/sda (Crucial 256GB SSD)
/dev/sda1 /boot (256MB)
/dev/sda2 Volume group "rootvg" (remainder)

rootvg:
LV swaplv swap (16GB)
LV root1lv / (/altroot) (10GB)
LV root2lv /altroot (/) (10GB)
LV homelv /home (20GB)
LV virtsyslv /opt/quemu/VEs (50GB)

The first thing i learned when researching the viability of this concept was that the SSD must not be written completely full or have the performance somewhat degraded. There are even special mount options, which i started to research into - i will keep you updated about my progress.

bakunin