New beginnings
I arrived back in New Zealand tired, and with a head full of KDE related thoughts to digest.
After having my laptop stolen by some miscreant in Dublin, I went and visited the Sony store on my street and came home with a new shiny. Behold his prettiness! I’m thinking of calling him Hippo.
With Sony laptops not traditionally being known for being Linux compatible I was expecting a great deal of work ahead of me when I got home. Sony had left a 40GB ntfs partition empty for user data, so I deleted it and created an ext3 partition to install Ubuntu dapper onto. The installer went very smoothly, with my Intel wireless and slightly unusual 1366×768 screen resolution working out of the box. Kudos to Ubuntu.
Suspend and hibernation did not work under the 2.6.15 kernel that ships with Ubuntu. The machine hard locked and needed to have the power and the battery removed before it would boot again. I compiled the latest 2.6.18 kernel and then found suspend-to-ram working flawlessly - and so fast! It’s only about 3 seconds to sleep and another 3 to wake. I’m amazed at the work that the Linux kernel developers have put into laptop/ACPI support. As of the 2.6.17 kernel, Linux really is ready for even the most bleeding edge laptop technology. Would the Linux kernel developers appreciate being sent a bunch of roses, I wonder?
So, with a little tinkering, I now have a gorgeous 11″ ultraportable with ~6 hours battery life running Linux flawlessly. I’ve pulled and compiled KDE 3.5 from branch and checked out trunk and I’m ready to do some serious docs hacking and a little work on some content for KDE.org.
I took the vaio for a trip to my local Apple store this morning to find a bag small enough for him. I figured they’d have some, with all the 12″ iBooks and powerbooks they’ve sold. I picked up a great crumpler bag that’s only slightly too big, and was vastly amused at the sight of 3 mac sales zealots oohing, aahing, and fondling my PC running KDE.
