Upgrading Argo

[mdlbear]

I've been spending some time this afternoon upgrading my Thinkpad T21, which I purchased several years ago at a surplus joint. One of my coworkers handed me a 60GB hard drive (removed from an upgraded laptop) that was flaky in his machine at home. We'll see. Replacing a drive on an IBM laptop is a cakewalk.

The install disk for the current Ubuntu, 7.10, boots but does something horrible to the display, making it basically uninstallable. Debian Etch does the same horrible thing, but at least it gets installed so you can flip the driver over to vesa, which is where I had it before. My alternate disk for 7.10 had an error on it, but I also downloaded Hardy alpha 5. That worked perfectly, and is currently installing.

I tried both my WiFi cards; neither worked. Hopefully a suitable driver will fix it. One of them (the 802-11g, oddly enough) actually recognized the network, but kept insisting on a password and wouldn't connect. It's an open network, damnit. Or do I have to kick the router? (9:08 that did it! Just fscking worked. I could really get to love Ubuntu.) (9:32 Still some flakiness -- unclear whether bugs or bad drive. Current thinking favors bugs.)

It's also an open question whether any of the usual laptop features will be recognized out of the box; Etch wouldn't even suspend properly.

Finally, I still have to copy over the old Windows 98SE partition; that will require a USB adapter and searching for the driver disk. The machine is going to a non-geek who's used to Windows; whether I can persuade her to switch over is an open question, so it's important to leave both options open. Hopefully I'll be able to do that with the partition manager once I find a USB enclosure to plop the old drive into.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

If you get to that horrible display, you can try ctrl-alt-F1 to get to one of the virtual terminals, or ctrl-alt-backspace to kill the X server altogether, and then go in and edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf, find the driver, and manually edit "vesa" in. Sub-optimal, but...

OTOH, if Hardy is working now, and the sources.list entries all say "hardy" rather than something like "testing", there's no reason not to stick with that... that'll give you the max amount of time before your target audience has to face an upgrade..

*oh*. Ummm... how susceptible is this little hummer to thermal abuse? One wonders.... what would be really nice is if all the airflow were through the sides rather than some of it coming from underneath. One could be hopeful...

[mdlbear]

By "horrible", I mean "doesn't respond to ctrl-alt-anything". I tried that.

It does seem to be working in Hardy; I had some trouble in the user management control panel app, but a manual sudo adduser worked. It's now upgrading.

All the airflow appears to be from the sides. Yay! There is still some danger of blockage, but not so much.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Horrible indeed, WRT the other OSen not responding. As popular as Thinkpads are, I'm surprised that made it into the final release... but it's good to know that the, ahh, Hardy Boys are on the case... :)

And yay for good airflow design! I imagine there are a heck of a lot of users out there, even smart ones, who don't even think about the consequences of setting a laptop down on a soft surface....

I know $PREVIOUSCOMPANY's TP X40 didn't have any cooling intakes on the bottom either, but nevertheless got pretty darn warm under there, prompting me to keep the thing elevated more than it's little rubber feet would normally allow, for airflow purposes. Glad to know the T21 hopefully won't have that issue.....

[mdlbear]

It'll still get warm on the bottom; a table or tray is always a good idea, but at least it won't need cooling fans in the tray.

Older X servers used to work fine; this appears to be a recent development (last couple of years) possibly brought on by incompatible changes in the chipset.