Category Archives: laptop

My travelling companion

Replacement Laptop

It’s getting close to the time that my poor old IBM X40 will need replaced. It’s been a great machine and has served me well for all these years, but its age is starting to show. Like me, it’s starting … Continue reading

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Ubuntu Automount?

The Ubuntu install on this laptop is now on it’s 3rd version (8.04 having started on 6.10) and it works really well, except it doesn’t want to automatically mount USB media. It used to. Then it stopped. The problem started … Continue reading

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upgrade to feisty

After waiting for the initial hysteria to die down and having not seen any negative reports about the upgrade, I finally pressed the button and let the laptop upgrade while I went to the gym. I’d already upgraded my AMD64 … Continue reading

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feet

The feet on the laptop keep falling off. It’s a natural side effect of having pushed and prodded the poor little thing into my bags when there was barely enough space for it, but it’s still mildly annoying. Anyone have … Continue reading

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new laptop battery installed

After a bit of hunting around I found an eBay seller who had replacement batteries for a reasonable price. I ordered it on Tuesday, it arrived today. design capacity: 25940 mWh last full capacity: 25940 mWh The original battery lasted … Continue reading

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laptop battery

design capacity: 27360 mWh last full capacity: 8820 mWh Think that says it all really. Time for a replacement!

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hard drive

After the laptop died and I arranged for a replacement, I started wondering how I could get by until the new drive arrived. The answer I arrived at was an external hard drive with Ubuntu installed onto it. Getting this … Continue reading

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xchat2 freenode script

The first one I grabbed was a bust, but this one works as advertised http://www-inf.int-evry.fr/~olberger/weblog/wp-content/identify_and_join_py.txt

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x40 disk dies

I rebooted from Windows into Ubuntu yesterday and watched in horror as it said various essential files didn´t exist. It was one of those ¨heart in your mouth¨ type moments that tend to preceed really bad events. This was no … Continue reading

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automatic updates

One of the features that all modern OS’s require these days is that they update themselves on a regular basis. Ubuntu is no different and normally the process is as smooth as smooth can be. Occasionally though it introduces a … Continue reading

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ubuntu and usb

One of the really good things about Ubuntu was the ability it demonstrates to “just work”. Plug in a USB device and bing! It’s there. Or at least it was. For some reason it now doesn’t detect when I plug … Continue reading

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where is sunbird?

ubuntu still doesn’t have sunbird available as a package It’s a shame as it’s an application I had started using mroe and more on FreeBSD. Having a timetable that could best be described as “variable”, the ability to publish for … Continue reading

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ubuntu redux

When I decided to make the move to ubuntu on the desktop I also decided that I would change my laptop. The logic is that I’d rather only have one OS on the two “desktops” I use. It should make … Continue reading

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dri for intel 855

This laptop has an Intel 855GM video card and according to the man page for the driver it should be able to use DRI. Every time I’ve tried this it has failed to initialise correctly, but finally having an application … Continue reading

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keyboard confusion

I’m running Gnome 2.12 on my laptop and desktop. The desktop is AMD64 FreeBSD -CURRENT and the laptop is i386 with 6-STABLE. They both have experienced problems with setting the correct keyboard layout in the past, but both were working … Continue reading

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bluetooth

My laptop has bluetooth, my mobile has bluetooth. So they should be able to communicate. Seems simple enough. I’ve done it in windows XP, but never tried it under FreeBSD until today. I figured that as the support has been … Continue reading

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iwi firmware

If you have a laptop running with an iwi wireless card on FreeBSD 6, I’d suggest NOT upgrading your iwi-firmware port. I did last night and so now I’m stuck using using a cable! Ever since the “upgrade” all I … Continue reading

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USB Mouse & Keyboard

As I’m trying to not use my desktop system (the strange noises seem to grow in number every time I contemplate the power switch) until my new system is nearing readiness (should really get on with arranging that!), I’ve been … Continue reading

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Where has my voice gone?

One slightly annoying thing about the laptop running FreeBSD/Gnome is that presently I can’t get the microphne to work, so using the recently installed Skype isn’t as great an experience as it should be. Of course I also had these … Continue reading

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VGA output

Following the problems I experienced in Stuttgart with the laptop’s output, I decided to spend some time today trying to fix it. To be honest I was rather too tired to do anything more involved after getting up rather early … Continue reading

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