James Duncan

Flying into Akaturk airport, Istanbul and having it feel homely because of the amount of times you've flown through it recently.

Demon sysadmins, at least, can view the IWF list but only hijack DNS requests. A screengrab is shown below as evidence of this. Demon's implementation also means that a simple comparison of Demon DNS responses routing to proxy versus OpenDNS routing to the actual site generates a confirmation of the ban for anyone to confirm. The screenshot is evidence of both.

Update: It would appear that Picasa chokes on that large an image - the file is also here.

This machine came with a preinstall of Windows Vista Business OEM, but only 2GB of RAM. That was clearly an extremely poor choice, so I have installed Ubuntu Intrepid on it (and detailed compatibility and tweaks below). The laptop is light and runs a lot cooler than my previous x61s, although at the price of a slight increase in size. Personally I think that's a price worth paying, and the battery life is currently at about 7 hours on the 9 cell battery so it's also practical for long college lectures. The build quality is extremely good, and I can even race in TORCS, shoot things in OpenArena and use Google Earth on it. I'd recommend it as a linux laptop.

Processor

The processor is an Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU L9400 @ 1.86GHz, and runs fine under Intrepid including frequency scaling.

Graphics

The 4500MHD works well in performance (700fps in glxgears), but detects resolutions poorly at first, with the autodetect only picking up a 1024x768 resolution. I enclose my xorg.conf, which fixes the issue. It should also be noted that this is already fixed in Jaunty Alpha 3, where it works out of the box.

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "X.org Configured"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
EndSection

Section "Files"
ModulePath "/usr/lib64/xorg/modules"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/misc/"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/TTF/"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/OTF"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/Type1/"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/100dpi/"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/75dpi/"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/corefonts/"
FontPath "/usr/share/fonts/mathematica-fonts/"
EndSection

Section "Module"
Load "dri"
Load "extmod"
Load "glx"
Load "record"
Load "xtrap"
Load "dbe"
Load "freetype"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "LEN"
ModelName "4010"
Option "DPMS"
Option "PreferredMode" "1280x800"
EndSection


Section "Monitor"
Identifier "FakeHDMI-1"
Option "Ignore" "True"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "FakeHDMI-2"
Option "Ignore" "True"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Option "DRI"
Identifier "Card0"
Driver "intel"
VendorName "Intel Corporation"
BoardName "Unknown Board"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
Option "monitor-HDMI-2" "FakeHDMI-2"
Option "monitor-HDMI-1" "FakeHDMI-1"
Option "monitor-LVDS" "Monitor0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Card0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
Modes "1280x800" "1024x768" "800x600"
# Virtual 1920 1200
EndSubSection
EndSection

The screen resolution preference can then be adjusted correctly. Many x200s models have 1440x900 screens, in which case the resolutions above should be altered accordingly.

Screen

Brightness controls function perfectly, as does backlight control.

Optical Drive

I don't have one, so I cannot comment.

Sound

The Intel HDA sound works out of the box, including the internal and external microphone and the volume controls above the keyboard.

Webcam

The webcam is a UVC camera (17ef:480c) that is branded by Lenovo. It appears as a normal UVC device and works fully in Skype, Cheese and Ekiga. The picture quality is good, and it works well even under relatively low light.

Ethernet

The ethernet connector is a e1000e, and works perfectly out of the box. The command "ethtool -s eth0 wol d" allows the ethernet card to sleep, and I have enabled it in /etc/rc.local to save power.

Wireless

The Intel 5300 802.11abgn wifi card works fully, as one now expects from Intel chipsets. Network Manager can handle all forms of encryption, and works after suspend.

The wireless switch works as one would expect.

Bluetooth

The bluetooth works fully out of the box.

56K Modem

I have not attempted to use this.

USB

USB works across all ports, and can autosuspend with a config tweak. Bear in mind that the fingerprint reader and bluetooth work via USB, and will thus prevent autosuspend if activated.

Suspend & hibernate

Both work fully out of the box. The time to come back from suspending to RAM is about 5 seconds.

I have been enticed to install Gears by the offline support in Gmail, Google Reader and Wordpress, but was unable to easily find a current build to install. To save people trawling through the net, I have listed the builds available here.

The files are linked as XPI files, so a simple click on the links below should bring up the install dialogue. I will update this post as new versions come out.

gears-linux-x86_64-opt-05210.xpi (Current as of 18/05/09)
gears-linux-opt-05110.xpi (2/Feb/09)
gears-linux-opt-0.4.9.0.xpi (27/Jul/08)
gears-linux-opt-0.3.25.0.xpi (18/Jun/08)
gears-linux-opt-0.3.8.0.xpi (07/Mar/08)

I waited 8 years for a night like last night. 8 years. And I cried, and I was happy, and proud. It was what Gore's campaign always should have been. Intellectual without being too aloof from normal people. Based on hope rather than fear, and conducted in a way that respects the intelligence of the electorate.

And it worked. Now to the actual hard work. I'm so thrilled to be able to see what happens now.

Having come back from the 1500 meter inter-college Cambridge running competition, I learnt I still need to do some more distance running work, although I happily avoided last place. My 20 min rowing distance (4200 meters) and 1500m running time (6:30) are left here to make me have to train to improve them before mentioning them again.

I started rowing yesterday, in what was in fact a moderately insane day. My arms burnt while on the river, I then spent the day doing administrative law, then a solid hour of aerobics (easily the hardest part) and lastly another jogging session. By the end of this year I will either be incredibly fit or dead...