Delicious LiveJournal Links for 6-23-2008

• This much I know: Steven Pinker (a self-interview)
  Massive left hemisphere strokes or the entire surgical removal of the left hemisphere can leave people with no articulate speech other than the ability to swear, spout cliches and song lyrics.
  (tags: stephen_pinker interview science brains)

Linux: Still not quite there

So, I had a laptop with a copy of Windows 2000 on it - an old Dell C600 that used to belong to surliminal. And it was a bit crusty with software installs, so I decided to wipe it and start again.

However, having played around with Linux a bit recently - both in VMs and on the Eee, I thought I'd give it a go on the laptop. I downloaded the latest Ubuntu install, burnt it to CD, stuck it into the drive and set it installing.

The install process was incredibly easy - took about 45 minutes (including drive formatting) and asked me only a few simple questions. It came up with the terribly pretty Heron desktop picture, and everything looked ok. Well, except that the wireless card didn't work, and the screen resolution wouldn't go about 800x600. Oh, and it wanted to install 195 updates to system files. So I let it do that.

Sorting out the latter problem looked to be simple. I've never edited an x.org config file, but it didn't look like it would kill me. Getting the wifi working looked harder, as I found multiple conflicting suggestions. I was willing to give it a go though. First I had to pop out, so I told the laptop to suspend and.... the screen went white.

So I told it to unsuspend, and it came back to a corrupted screen and then hung.

Fine, I though - I'll just have it hibernate. Nope, that didn't work either.

So I checked about, and discovered that switching to APM rather than ACPI might help. For which I'd have to edit the startup scripts. Looked easy though - so I chucked in a noacpi parameter and gave that a go.

No dice - still won't resume from suspend or hibernate. A quick check finds that a fair number of other people have had the same problem, with no resolution.

And as Windows 2000 will do both of those, and they're kind of vital for laptop use, it's back to Win2k for that machine.

I strongly suspect that this is an "old driver" issue - and that as the C600 came out in 2000, it's just not comformant enough to specs to work well. Modern hardware will, no doubt, work better.

Oh well.

World Of Julie

Julie (staring at her laptop intently): If you're ever going to buy me a prostitute don't get me a blonde one.
Andy: ...
Andy: You're reading Punternet again, aren't you?

(Yes, it's her birthday today. No, I didn't get her a prostitute.)