February 2009 - WLUG - wlug.mailman3.com

Lenovo S10 Netbook

by Mike Leo

I picked one of these up at Circuit City last week and am looking to speed it up where ever possible. (Reviewed below). It has a normal SATA II drive in it and I know an SSD drive would significantly speed it up, but don't want to spend any more $ on it. http://www.trustedreviews.com/storage/review/2008/05/08/OCZ-64GB-SATA-II-SS… has pretty graphs to compare. I weaseled a RAM upgrade out of my hard ware guy so I have 1.5gigs in it now (max'd). I ran speed tests between booting off the SATA II drive and the same install via USB 2.0 thumb drive and boot times were around 50 seconds for either. I know there are SSD ExpressCards for cheap (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820191057) but I read that the ExpressCards are really just USB 2.0 speeds anyway so I wouldn't see any difference from my thumb drive test. Short of compiling my own kernel (which I never can seem to do right), any other advise on how to speed up a netbook's boot time? I will say once booted, everything runs pretty well, though I'm sure I wouldn't mind more speed then, too! grazie! Mike Review: Stopped in to Circuit City today and (impulsively?) bought a Lenovo IdeaPad S10. I've been looking for something to waste my money on/replace the Dell I bought that I ended up not liking and turning over to my wife, so it wasn't extremely impulsive, just a little impulsive. Anyway, it was 10% of the normal price, which brought it down to $370. Not a great deal at that price since online it is like $350 or so, but the one I got has twice as much RAM and hard drive space as online numbers, plus no shipping. Specs: Intel Atom N270 1.6ghz CPU (Intel has returned to multi-threading) 10.2 inch screen 1GIG RAM 160Gig SATA II Hard drive Wired/Wireless NIC cards 3 Cell Lithium-Ion 2.64lbs No CDROM (not a big deal as I have a Lenovo USB CDROM drive anyway) The size: possibly the perfect size...small, light weight without being tiny. 10.2 inch 1024x600 screen and not an impossibly tiny keyboard (though obviously not full sized). It is about the size of a larger hard cover book. The OS: Comes with Windows XP and it ran very well...applications opened fast, web surfing was responsive and I could open several apps at once without much hit to performance. After 27 different questions about my loyalty to Bill Gates, I decided it was time to upgrade. Concerned that the new hardware may have issues with older versions of Linux, I jumped right into an as-yet-to-be released version of Ubuntu (9.04). Booted right up, answered a couple questions and installed like a champ...saw the disk, the RAM, the wireless card, everything...during the install. Upon reboot into Linux though, nothing...it just wouldn't boot. "No OS found". I thought my partitioning might be screwing me up, so I let the installer pick, but to no avail. I booted off live CD's, but when I mounted and chroot'd into my install, the install didn't even see my /dev/sda. At one point I finally got to a grub > boot, but still wouldn't boot to the OS. I tried a Debian 4.0 install, but that didn't see either the wired or wireless nics. Similar to the Ubuntu, Fedora 10 installed, but would never boot. So I tried a Ubuntu 8.10 install and everything was fine! Installed with my partitions (/boot, /, /home and swap) and all is well in the world. Wired, wireless, SATA, screen resolution....everything works straight from the install. I'm still testing and upgrading but over all this is a great netbook and takes to Ubuntu Linux straight away, and for less than $400 a great addition to my daily commute.

Feb. 12, 2009

Re: [Wlug] Community Training

by Patrick Sawyer

We still kinda do this stuff. Unfortunately my time now gets spent on the job, not allowing much room for this stuff. I still get donations and we still give computers away, just not in the same capacity. I would be happy to go over the lessons I have learned, things that worked, and things we could have done better. Pat Sawyer On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 2:22 PM, Clint Moyer <cdmoyer(a)charter.net> wrote: > > ---- Michael Long <mlong(a)datalong.com> wrote: > > ============= > > The Free Geek project looks like my idea on steroids. Too bad they are > on the other coast. They are a good resource though. > > > http://www.fgri.org > _______________________________________________ > Wlug mailing list > Wlug(a)mail.wlug.org > http://mail.wlug.org/mailman/listinfo/wlug >

Feb. 12, 2009

Miro gets a makeover

by Richard Klein

I haven't read the article yet, but it looks like Miro 2.0 has launched. Miro was the topic of last month's meeting. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/10/miro-gets-a-makeover/ -- Rich

Feb. 10, 2009

Re: [Wlug] How to (not) Damage a FLASH Storage Device

by Brian J. Conway

On Fri, 6 Feb 2009, John Stoffel wrote: > I'm curious how well ext2/3/4 and btrfs would work on an SSD formated > properly? Also, don't alot of SSDs actually do wear levelling at > their firmware level, to get around alot of these issues? Yes, but it looks like there are also nice performance gains to be had when aligning partitions. A very throrough discussion can be found here: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=48309 Brian

Feb. 6, 2009

Re: [Wlug] Any ruby hackers?

by John Stoffel

Randy> I am learning Ruby right now. You can also ask your question on Randy> the bostonrb.org mailing list: Randy> http://groups.google.com/group/boston-rubygroup That's a great suggestion. I've been learning Ruby (on Rails) on an off for the past year or so, but this is my first real dive deep into the language and it's expectation. I'm not enjoying it really. :] Guess I'm too hardwired for Perl5. :] Thanks for the suggestions. Basically, I'm trying to extend 'philesight' to be able to recursively descend directories building it's DB of sizes, but with multiple kid or slave processes to spread the work out and have it complete faster. I actually had this working just fine with Ruby Threads, but then I found out that Ruby has a single thread for the interpretter, and jsut emulates real threads. So no performance gain. Now I'm working on forking() off kids to do the work, but the coordination is being painful. Anyone interested in what I've got? John

Feb. 6, 2009

Re: [Wlug] How to (not) Damage a FLASH Storage Device

by John Stoffel

>>>>> "Chuck" == Chuck Anderson <cra(a)WPI.EDU> writes: Chuck> I found this article enlightening: Chuck> http://wiki.laptop.org/go/How_to_Damage_a_FLASH_Storage_Device Interesting. Doesn't talk about environmental effects all, so I'd probably re-title it to say "Poor disk layout format can kill your SSD". Or something like that. I'm curious how well ext2/3/4 and btrfs would work on an SSD formated properly? Also, don't alot of SSDs actually do wear levelling at their firmware level, to get around alot of these issues? Seeing some test results of identical SSDs being formatted in good and bad ways and then written to until dead would be interesting. John

Feb. 6, 2009

Re: [Wlug] How to (not) Damage a FLASH Storage Device

by Richard Klein

On Thu, Feb 5, 2009 at 9:50 PM, Chuck Anderson <cra(a)wpi.edu> wrote: > I found this article enlightening: > > http://wiki.laptop.org/go/How_to_Damage_a_FLASH_Storage_Device The article is incomplete. I didn't see any mention of leaving your flash device in the passenger footwell of a car with a leaking sunroof for a few days. -- Rich

Feb. 6, 2009

How to (not) Damage a FLASH Storage Device

by Chuck Anderson

I found this article enlightening: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/How_to_Damage_a_FLASH_Storage_Device

Feb. 6, 2009

Re: [Wlug] Any ruby hackers?

by Randy Cole

Hi John, I am learning Ruby right now. You can also ask your question on the bostonrb.org mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/boston-rubygroup John Stoffel wrote: > Guys, > > I'm looking for some help with a Ruby script which uses the 'Drb' and > 'Slave' libraries. Basically, I'm doing a recursive readdir() on a > directory, but with parallel processes (since Ruby Threads aren't > really parallel, sigh...) and I'm running into some problems. > > I'm happy to post the code here, before I start begging for help on > the http://www.ruby-forum.com site. > > Thanks, > John > _______________________________________________ > Wlug mailing list > Wlug(a)mail.wlug.org > http://mail.wlug.org/mailman/listinfo/wlug >

Feb. 6, 2009

Any ruby hackers?

by John Stoffel

Guys, I'm looking for some help with a Ruby script which uses the 'Drb' and 'Slave' libraries. Basically, I'm doing a recursive readdir() on a directory, but with parallel processes (since Ruby Threads aren't really parallel, sigh...) and I'm running into some problems. I'm happy to post the code here, before I start begging for help on the http://www.ruby-forum.com site. Thanks, John

Feb. 5, 2009