Remap capslock on the eeepc

April 9, 2008 – 9:03 pm

One has a couple of options for tweaking the tiny keyboard on the e3 to deal with the braindead caps-lock key. If you want to swap it with the left control key - meaning your caps-lock becomes a control key, and your left control key become caps-lock, then edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file as follows:

Section "InputDevice" Identifier "keyboard" Driver "kbd" Option "CoreKeyboard" Option "XkbRules" "xorg" Option "XkbLayout" "us" Option "XkbVariant" "" Option "XkbOptions" "ctrl:swapcaps" EndSection

If you want to entirely disable caps-lock and replace it with control the you need: Section "InputDevice" Identifier "keyboard" Driver "kbd" Option "CoreKeyboard" Option "XkbRules" "xorg" Option "XkbLayout" "us" Option "XkbVariant" "" Option "XkbOptions" "ctrl:nocaps" EndSection

Which way Dell?

April 1, 2008 – 8:08 pm

Just when I was starting to warm up to Dell after a very long absence I see that some significant business machinations are underway. I was happy to send some money their way to signal that some consumers think it is great to offer linux preinstalled on decent commodity hardware. Reading about significant layoffs coincident with rising profits has me thinking that some of my good will might be doing a return migration. We shall see.

Trip to Morgantown

March 16, 2008 – 7:51 pm


This week I had the pleasure of spending a few days at the Regional Research Institute of the West Virginia University, where I was invited to give a talk. I had not been to Morgantown in probably 10 years or so and enjoyed the drive down from Pittsburgh - the countryside is quite beautiful, even in the late part of winter. Randy Jackson was my gracious host and took the time to show me a bit of the area. One of the highlights was a chance to spend some time visiting with Bill Miernyk who founded the institute and is a legend in the field of regional science. I also got to experience some of the local food and folk, all of which added up to a grand time in a beautiful part of the country.

M1330n On the road

March 9, 2008 – 7:32 pm

Last week I had a road trip and decided to give the M1330 a go. I was a little concerned that I would have trouble getting wireless connections given the little snag I ran into at work. But at the San Diego Airport while waiting for my flight I popped the lid open and was happy to see that I was finding a connection, and a free connection to boot.

With that concern laid to rest, I got down to using the machine to give a short presentation. This was another area where I was curious to see how things would go as in the past I had mixed experience getting my Linux running laptops to work well with projectors for presentations. In this case it was simply a matter of plugging in the vga cable and toggling the F8 key. Compiz and the 3D cube rotation looked pretty amazing projected up on the wall.

I had picked up a second battery on ebay and had a chance to test out swapping while the machine was hibernating. Worked just fine.

On the whole, the machine makes a nice road laptop. It definitely is an improvement over the X61 when it came to working with a projector. Also, now that I’ve been using this for a week steady I’ve yet to have a hang when coming out of sleep or hibernation, which is not the case for the X61 where there can be hangs but not in any predictable fashion. The M1330 is a little bit heavier than the X61, but you get more screen real estate as part of the bargain.

Thinkpad X61, Dell XPS M1330 and Eee Pc: Week One

February 16, 2008 – 3:16 pm

It has been one week now since the beginning of my experiment with the new laptops. So far, so good. Very good actually. Here are some observations:

X61

Gutsy Gibbon works just fine on this thing. In terms of the “gotta haves” the following work out of the box:

  • suspend
  • hibernate
  • wireless

The X61 is noticeably lighter than the m1330 and I definitely prefer the thinkpad keyboards (and trackpoint) to any other laptop setup I’ve tried.

Hibernation takes about 30 seconds to go down, and another 30 to resume and wireless seems to recover nicely. These times are on par with what is needed for booting, but a regular shut down is much quicker. I can’t see me using hibernation too often day to day, but it certainly would be the ticket on a plane when I need to stop working half way through something complex and I would not want to have to start everything over again from scratch. Picking up where I left off would be nice.

Suspend works much more quickly than hibernate, but the trade-off is you are still using a little juice. Haven’t had a chance to see what the drain actually is during sleep. The wireless connection comes back on nicely upon resuming. Having suspend working is pretty critical for the way I use laptops so I’m pleased with the X61/Ubuntu setup in this regard.

Another key feature I need in a laptop is the ability to work smoothly with an lcd projector for presentations at conferences and for lectures. My previous experiences with the X40 were never quite fully successful. With the X61 it appears that plugging it into a running projector and toggling the F7 key does nothing. However, if I reboot the X61 with the vga connection intact, then the LCD image is mirrored out to the projector. And, unlike the case for the X40, the image is not blurred. I would say this is an improvement over the last thinkpad. Having the ability to plug in and go without a reboot would be nice, but this is at least workable.

I remember reading somewhere that another possible fix is to restart the Xserver while the vga connection is in place ala CTRL-ALT-Backspace but I’ve yet to try this out.

Dell XPS M1330

I’ve not used the M1330 as much this week so I haven’t really kicked the tires too extensively, and look forward to doing so this week. The screen on this thing is just gorgeous. It is the first glossy screen laptop I’ve had, but I find myself quite liking the look. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of glare, although I’ve only used it indoors thus far.

The one small problem I encountered with the M1330 had to do with a wireless connection and the authentication scheme used at work. There is a web based authorization form that you need to access in order to use the wireless points on my campus. For some reason, I’m not able to get the authorization form to load in firefox, despite network manager showing me that I’m getting an IP through dhcp. This is weird as it worked fine for the X61 and the E3 (below). I’ll have to check on it next week some more.

Eee Pc

Took the smallest member of the family into work one day. On the way in I used it while waiting on the trolley, then again on the trolley and actually got some work done. Once I got to work the connection/authentication dance went just fine and I was browsing in no time. Lot’s of coworkers commented about how little and “cute” the thing is. I would have to agree.

The keyboard is definitely smaller and takes some getting used to, but I am coming around to finding it workable.

At home, the E3pc is really nice for light surfing from a favorite chair/couch and I even managed to watch a movie on it (ripped to a usb keydrive). Could be the ticket for in-flight entertainment.

I also started modifying things over the default setup. I opted for the advanced view which is basically an older version of KDE. I’m also tempted to play around with different distros on different sd cards but haven’t had the time just yet.

Thus far I’m really liking the E3. It will be a keeper.

Macbook Air = Thinkpad X61 + Dell XPS M1330 + Asus EEEPC

February 9, 2008 – 6:41 pm

About two weeks ago I pulled the trigger on an order for a Macbook air. I wanted something light for the road and the spell that is Apple marketing worked its magic on me and so I clicked the buttons.

Then I had to figure out a way to pay for it. Since getting yet another laptop wasn’t going to be an option (if I want to stay happily married), I thought why do I need all these laptops - they have to go to make room. So I put the X40, the toshiba sattelite from thelip, my macbook pro and an old sony vaio up for sale on Ebay. More on those adventures in a future post, but for now let’s just say the decision to go lean and mean and down to one laptop was like turning over a new leaf.

What happened next was that the Apple spell must have worn off as the thing was to ship in three weeks and I realized that the mba wasn’t the only slick portable in the game. With the AppleCare the thing was pushing 2100 USD and I started thinking I could do better. So since I was in the Ebay swing of things, I bid on and won a Thinkpad X61 - brand new with a three year warranty and Vista Home. Well, two out of three aren’t bad. So upon its arrival I promptly installed Gutsy and by the end of the day after some adventures with Compiz, the new thinkpad is a snappy update to my beloved X40.

That purchase left me with some change out of the 2100 I set aside for the mba, so the next item to come my way was a 4Gig white Asus EEPC. Even after picking up that neat little bundle of joy I still had some change over so I thought the recent move by Dell puting Ubuntu on the M1330 was worth my attention and dollars so I sent the rest of my savings to Dell. The M1330 arrived last night and is quite a nice machine - I’m typing this on it as we speak.

I will be doing fuller reviews of all three of these new portables shortly but for now I just wanted to do the math to show that in terms of outlay:

Macbook Air = Thinkpad X61 + Dell XPS M1330 + Asus EEEPC

mac users self satisfied

January 17, 2008 – 8:04 pm

Who knew?

Xmas 07 Ride

December 25, 2007 – 3:03 pm

Photo_122507_001
Originally uploaded by sergerey.

Headed out today to repeat last year’s December 25 ride. It seems as if the weather was pretty much identical. 70’s and clear blue skies. Took it slower today as I am fighting off some kind of bug. Still it was a beautiful ride.


31 miles, 130 minutes.

Sunset for Santa

December 24, 2007 – 8:40 pm

Mission Beach

Like a good Californian I spent the night before the fat man visits down at the left coast. Extreme low tides together with 10% humidity and severe clear skies made it a visual feast. Fortunately I remembered my camera.

Disk Usage Analyzer

December 22, 2007 – 2:47 pm

Although the trend of cheaper storage space might make this less of interest, I stumbled on a cool utility for getting the big picture of your hard drive usage. Under Gutsy, fire up a terminal and enter baobab. You should see something like the following:

The panel on the right is interactive, so moving your mouse over the different sections will let you know what directory is using how much space.