Joe’s Blog!

I now have suspend working on my new T61. It was an easy fix after all, I had just not read thinkwiki close enough to find the answer. As you will see below “acpi_sleep=s3_bios” is for Intel graphics cards and “acpi_sleep=s3_mode” is for Nvidia cards. I have confirmed that “acpi_sleep=s3_bios” does not work on the Nvidia chip but “acpi_sleep=s3_mode” indeed does work. Also note that I have the Atheros based thinkpad wireless and have not had any issues coming back from suspend and my wireless failing, which is an issue mentioned in the link above. It seems like an issue isolated to the Intel wireless cards.

Edit ‘/etc/default/acpi-support’:

# Should we save and restore state using the VESA BIOS Extensions?
SAVE_VBE_STATE=false
…
# Should we attempt to warm-boot the video hardware on resume?
POST_VIDEO=false
…
# Set the following to “platform” if you want to use ACPI to shut down
# your machine on hibernation
HIBERNATE_MODE=platform

Then add ‘acpi_sleep=s3_mode’ to ‘/boot/grub/menu.lst’ like so:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.22-14-generic root=UUID=dcf288e6-5431-4f65-bd88-2a6f58c02fae ro quiet nosplash acpi_sleep=s3_mode

After that my suspend worked just fine. I never use hibernate so I haven’t even tried it but I imagine it may work too.

I got Valve’s Orange Box (Portal, Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2 and friends) running really easily using this tutorial. It’s pretty basic stuff, getting Sling Player to work was a bit tougher but it works for me. The only issue I have with the Orange Box so far is I have yet found a way to adjust the in-game resolution, it seems locked at 1024×768. Kinda sucks but it’s fun to play games again. If anyone has any ideas post a comment and let me know.

After a long wait in the line at the UPS store I was able to pickup my new laptop. After I took my girl to a nice dinner I spent the good portion of the rest of the night getting everything setup and rolling. The only real caveat so far is I am having trouble with both suspend and hibernate. It seems those two items are as fickle as you can get in the world of linux. I found some tips on getting it work here (thinkwiki.org) but didn’t have any luck. One portion of the setup I was pleasantly surprised about was the nvidia graphics card. The Ubuntu restricted driver was used initial but I disabled it and I used envy to take care of the install and it is about as simple as it gets. Click ‘ok’ a couple times and it downloads the latest driver and sets it up and even configures xorg to use it. Also graphics related I had to boot up the installer in “graphics safe mode” I suppose this might be due to the proprietary nvidia drivers. At any rate it was a breeze. The Atheros wireless was detected and installed without a glitch as well. Pretty easy setup, everything seems to work well.

The laptop itself is sturdy, it feels like the IBM/Lenovo’s that I have had in the past. It has the same feel that my 600e (circa 1998) has. That may be looked down upon by some but I think the sturdy build quality and feel is a nice throwback to the days when things were overbuilt. That said the laptop isn’t all that heavy, it is certainly a bit heavier than the MacBook but it is also a bit wider and deeper.

A few things I am stoked about with this laptop are the high resolution screen. The last two laptops I have had have been 1280×768, which is nice enough but Lenovo had an option for 1440×900 resolution screens and I had to take it. The extra real estate is great. Another item is the nvidia graphics card, its been years since I have done any gaming but when I saw trailers (below) for Portal I had to make sure my next laptop had a decent graphics card. One other nice upgrade is from the Core Duo to the Core 2 Duo in this laptop. More speed, more cache and it’s 64bit. Also, I picked up 4GB of ram for this thing, should be a nice upgrade.

Here’s some nerdy stuff:

Specs:

Lenovo T61 (7662CTO)
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2GHz (T7500)
Nvidia Quadro NVS 140m
Hitachi 7200rpm 200GB
4GB Mushkin PC2-6400
DVD/CD Burner
Atheros ABG Wireless (Thinkpad Wireless)

Here’s the lspci:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 Memory Controller Hub (rev 0c)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 PCI Express Root Port (rev 0c)
00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82566MM Gigabit Network Connection (rev 03)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Contoller #4 (rev 03)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 03)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 03)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 03)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 03)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev f3)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801HBM (ICH8M-E) LPC Interface Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) IDE Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA AHCI Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation Quadro NVS 140M (rev a1)
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)
15:00.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c476 II (rev ba)
15:00.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller (rev 04)

Check out this wooden bike.

I haven’t done a cycling related post in quite some time, so here it goes.

The racing season is just a month or so away and I couldn’t be less prepared. That’s the way it feels anyway. My winter training has been much, much different than in the past. The last two winters I haven’t done crap, and then was pretty much M.I.A. when the bulk of the racing starts. Mostly because of work and life and any excuse I can come up with to not ride my bike indoors. The trainer sucks ass. Late last season I downgraded to the 3s in hopes that I will be able to race again and by race I mean finish races. A two year hiatus does not help a whole lot if you are racing in the 1/2s. Prior to the last couple years I would spend big number of hours on the bike (15 to 25) and a couple hours a week in the weight room. This winter I have rode very little probably 3 to 5 hours a week, pretty minuscule. But on the other hand I have been hitting the gym a lot more than I ever have. I have certainly gotten physically stronger, arguably as strong as I have ever been, but without a doubt I am bit heavier and laking endurance. I have no idea if this training plan will work so I am a bit of a guinea pig for myself. I suppose we will see how things go at Froze Toes, hopefully my younger brother doesn’t hurt me too bad. Once things get warmer I will head outside and get a few miles in. Hopefully my lift when its cold, ride when its warm training plan will at least keep me racing through August.