An unexpected delight (part 1 of 2)

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AussieBloke

An unexpected delight (part 1 of 2)

Post by AussieBloke »

My wife and I have, or more accurately, had two IBM Thinkpads T61p. One was and still is used for most personal work ... email, office stuff, banking, correspondence and so on. It stays at home. Too much personal stuff to risk loss or damage while travelling.

The only thing we'd miss while on tour is email. I get POP mail via four sources so everything is stored locally and backed up every week.

That machine has 8 Gb of RAM, a 480 GB solid state drive and a 1920x1200 pixel LCD screen. An intel Core2 duo at 2.6 GHz runs Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate quite smoothly. We don't use much Microsoft software; LibreOffice, Firefox and Thunderbird work very well for us and exhibit the same features on both Windows and linux.

(This story is about linux mint but a bit of background information helps set the scene.)

The other Thinkpad was quite similar except it had a mechanical hard drive. It used to be my travelling workplace. I had it loaded up with about six virtual machines and my employer's company's software. I could take the thing to a customer's site and if a problem turned out to be in our software I had the means to correct the program, compile it on a virtual machine which matched the customer's environment and install the updated software. Provided the customer was running some sort of Intel chip system then the problem could be fixed immediately but if customer was running on some environment for which I did not have a virtual machine then I'd have to take the whole thing back to the office. For the most part, though, it was a pretty powerful setup.

Then I retired and that machine became my "fun" system. I ditched Windows and loaded it up with linux as the primary operating system. I even dumped most of the virtual machines, including the Windows ones. It was a bit of an overkill for my retrocomputing projects which run on an (emulated) Z80 but that just meant it was a fast fun system. From a hardware perspective it was extremely close to the first one ... just a few Hz slower and a mechanical hard drive rather than a solid state one.

Three weeks ago that second ThinkPad T61p broke. No more fun. I installed cygwin on the first system and did just a little bit of Z80 development using that but it was not really convenient.

Over the years I had collected quite a few spare parts and I am no stranger to the task of stripping down a T61p and putting it back together. The trouble was that the warning beeps emitted when the machine was switched on indicated something pretty serious was wrong this time. Most likely it is a GPU failure and since the chip is wave-soldered onto the backplane replacing it was not going to be easy. I do have the gear but in my condition I was in no mood to tackle the task. It occurred to me that I might be able to buy a cheaper, less powerful, second-hand laptop which would be quite good enough to run my Z80 emulator on linux. Also, I don't have much longer to live and I didn't want to spend any of my remaining time on what could become a futile and frustrating exercise.

All my experience with laptops has been with ThinkPads. I have never owned anything else. As a consequence I had to spend quite a few days on eBay trying to figure out what was worthwhile, what useless crap I'd be paying for, what was reliability like and so on. After about 3 days there appeared a newly-listed HP/Compaq Presario which looked adequate and which had this magnificent keyboard. It was also about $50 cheaper than anything else comparable. The screen was only 1366 by 768 which is a bit stingy but still adequate. At least it was a decent physical size, larger than that on the ThinkPad. The hard drive was 250 GB, again adequate. A built-in dual layer DVD reader/writer was a non-essential extra. Only 2GB of RAM was installed, probably enough to run linux with acceptable performance on the single-core 2.2 GHz Celeron. I presumed that the 32-bit Windows Vista on the hard drive would really suck but since that was not going to be on the drive for very long I didn't worry about it. After all, a 2 GB upgrade could be had for under $30 if that were to be necessary so without any further dicking around I did the "buy it now" thing.

The computer arrived two days earlier than scheduled. As soon as I got it home I switched it on to ensure that it was alive. About four hours later (well it seemed that long) Vista found the screen. Sure enough it was 32-bit. That for me was a bit of a problem because although nothing I do really demands 64 bits I do use and write software for both 32- and 64-bit systems so I was hoping that the Celeron was a reasonably recent one which could at least handle 64-bit instructions.

Well, looking at the System Properties told me that the CPU was a Celron 900 and that is one which is supposed to be able to execute 64-bit instructions so I was starting to get happy. I was already in love with the keyboard which has a full numeric keypad over on the right. That is a boon for text editing, not because I type lots of numbers but because it can provide an extra set of cursor controls. (Long story but important to me.) But the best was yet to come.

Meanwhile, in the hope that the CPU would be a 64-bitter I had started a fresh download of linux mint 17.1. I live in a remote area I have a slow internet via satellite. The 1.6 GByte download had been running for almost 9 hours and had nearly 3 hours more to go. While waiting for that I decided to have another look at the broken Thinkpad because I thought of a couple of things I had not checked or which maybe needed to be re-checked. It was a futile exercise ... my fiddling with connections and so on made no difference to I abandoned that project. However I pulled the 500 GByte drive from the machine and in preparation for loading it with an updated linux mint, installed it in the Compaq.

Now for the point of the story ...

Just for fun I switched the Compaq on to see what would happen when it encountered an operating system installed on and configured for a rather different computer.

MAGIC HAPPENED!

The Compaq booted up cleanly on the Thinkpad's hard drive and worked flawlessly. All I had to do was change the xterm character font so my 40x80 windows didn't exceed the screen boundaries.

To me that was utterly unexpected. After that, all the rest is an anticlimax.
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Topic automatically closed 6 months after creation. New replies are no longer allowed.
AussieBloke

An unexpected delight (part 2 of 2)

Post by AussieBloke »

The screen is wide enough that I can be writing and testing Z80 software in one 40x80 xterm window and be browsing source code on the host in another right alongside it without any overlap.

For several days I was quite happy to continue working on the ThinkPad's operating system to the point that I wondered if it was even worthwhile upgrading from mint 17 to 17.1. They're both built on the same Ubuntu/Debian base system and I was quite used to 17. The only glitch I noticed was with the DVD drive. It really didn't like handling two-layer discs. Thinking about it, I realised that it was understandable. Nearly all other drivers in linux are fairly generic, even the video, but a DVD reader/burner is a bit of a specialty device so it was reasonable to expect that the Sony drive might not work flawlessly with drivers installed for a Matsushita device.

After some time I burned a 17.1 DVD and with all my work safely backed up (twice) went through the protracted installation. (Protracted because some stuff gets downloaded during installation and I have this really slow internet ...) Anyway after 12 hours that was all done and the DVD drive worked just like it is supposed to. And I learned that a lot of things
are slightly better in 17.1 than they were in 17 so that was an added bonus. For example, on 17 I had to resort to a bit of shell scripting to get the xterm window size set to 40 lines but in 17.1 it is just a matter of changing the profile definition. Even better, I like to remap the keyboard so that Caps Lock becomes something useful. To do that on 17 meant diving into the world of keymaps but on 17.1 it can be done through a configuration dialogue and the Presario keyboard is a predefined layout which is known by the tools and can be tweaked via the Keyboard properties dialogue in the Control Centre. So easy.

The bloke who sold me the system has mailed a couple of SODIMMs but he doesn't know if they are the right type (despite me telling him what would work and sending pictures thereof).

According to HP/Compaq the Presario will support 3 gigabytes of memory with a 32-bit Windows OS or 4 gigabytes a 64-bit version. Other web postings suggest that it will actually recognise and use 8. Meanwhile by briefly plugging in the two 4 gigabyte SODIMMs from the ThinkPad I confirmed that 8 Gbytes is indeed possible. That is far more than I really need for normal work but maybe there is some Windows-specific software that I would like to use in which case 8 GB would allow me to run a virtual machine quite comfortably and I do have at least one spare Windows 7 licence. (If you're going to run Windows then 7 is actually quite good, probably the best ever. On the other hand my feelings about Windows 8 border on pure hatred.) I'm going to flog off all my ThinkPad spare parts and I'll use some of the proceeds to get a pair of better SODIMMs; the ones in the ThinkPad are actually a bit slow for the Compaq and I don't know the long term effects of running slow memory. Having no prior experience with this range I don't want to take any risks.

So it has been a bit of drama but if things were going to break then it is better now than after I'm gone. After the memory upgrade I may think about putting in a dual-core CPU. Depends on how easy that is. Probably won't happen. I doubt that it will really be necessary. If my wife uses this machine it will be mostly for internet browsing and the Celeron 900 CPU is quite good enough for that! And she is about as interested in playing games as I am. (Hint: not much.)

I am still amazed that the Compaq ran so well on the linux mint which was installed on the ThinkPad. I seem to have ended up with a cheap laptop which is perfectly suited to what I need and want.

Thank you, linux mint. Now the fun continues!

(P.S. Migrating the Thunderbird data files from the stay-at-home ThinkPad to the Compaq is easy enough so I have that scripted and we can take the Compaq on the road with minimal risk.)
exploder
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Re: An unexpected delight (part 1 of 2)

Post by exploder »

Sounds like things are really going well for you! From reading your posts it looks like you have a lot of valuable experience that has paid off well for you. I enjoyed reading your posts!

Edit: It is amazing how you can transfer a fully loaded hard drive from one machine to another and have a fully working system! I do this a lot these days myself because often I get systems with no DVD drive. I just plug the hard drive in my good computer, install the OS and put it back.
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