Tag Archives: lenovo

The awesome tablet money can’t buy

Most people working in technology and have heard of and formulated some opinion about the Microsoft Surface tablet, now in it’s second generation of hardware. For some it’s a poor attempt to compete with the iPad, for others it’s the greatest laptop replacement they’ve ever seen, destined to bring the brilliance of Windows 8.1 to the masses.

Whilst I think it’s good for Apple and Android to have some competition in the tablet market, the Windows platform itself is of no interest to a GNU/Linux using, free-software loving individual like myself. What I do find interesting about the Microsoft Surface, is not the software, but rather the excellent high-specification hardware they’ve managed to cram into 980g of handheld excellence.

I’ve been using my Lenovo X201i Thinkpad for about 4 years now and it’s due for an upgrade – whilst still very functional, the lack of AES-NI and a low resolution display and poor GPU is starting to get quite frustrating, not to mention the weight!

The fully speced Microsoft Surface 2 Pro features a Core i5 CPU, 8GB of RAM and 512GB SSD, plus the ability to drive up to two external displays – qualities that would make it suitable as my primary workstation, whether on the go, or docked into larger displays at home – essentially a full laptop replacement.

Since the Microsoft Surface Pro 2 is x86-based and supports disabling secure-boot, it is possible to run GNU/Linux natively on the device, suddenly making it very attractive for my requirements.

It’s not a perfect device of course – the unit is heavy by tablet standards, and the lack of a 3G or LTE modem is a frustrating limitation. Battery life of the x86 Pro series is not where near as good as a low power ARM chip (although the Haswell Core i5 certainly has improved things over the generation 1 device)..

There’s also the question of cost, the fully speced unit is around $2,600 NZD which puts it in the same bracket as high end expensive laptops.

Personally I feel these ads need more design effort other than the product name and the convincing slogan of “Get it”!

Microsoft has certainly spared no expense advertising the Surface. With billboards, placement marketing in TV series and internet advertising, it’s hard not to notice them. Which is why it’s even more surprising that Microsoft made the monumental mistake of not stocking enough units to buy.

I’m not sales or marketing expert, but generally my understanding is that if you want people to buy something, you should have stock to sell to them. If I walk into the Apple store down the road, I can buy an iPad in about 5mins. But if I try to buy the competing Microsoft Surface, I get the depressing statement that the unit is “Out of Stock”:

All models of Surface Pro 2, out of stock on AU online store.

In fact, even it’s less loved brother, the ARM-based Windows RT version which can’t run anything other than Microsoft Store applications is out of stock as well.

Even the fundamentally flawed RT-family of devices is sold out.

Even the feature limited RT-family of devices is sold out.

The tablets seem to have been out of stock since around December 2013, which suggests that the Christmas sales exhausted all the stock and Microsoft has been unable to resupply it’s distributors.

Possibly Microsoft limited the volume of units manufactured in fear of ending up with unsold units (like the difficult to shift Surface RT Gen-1 series that got written down) and didn’t manufacture as many units as they otherwise would have – a gamble that has shown itself to be a mistake. I wonder how many missed sales have resulted, where people gave up waiting and either went for a third party Windows tablet, or just purchased an iPad?

Microsoft hasn’t even provided an ETA for more stock or provided an email option to be advised and get first dibs on new stock when it arrives eventually.

Of interest, when comparing NZ and AU stock availability and pricing, the price disparity isn’t too bad. The top model Surface Pro 2 costs AUD $1854 excluding GST, whereas the New Zealand model sells for NZD $2260 excluding GST, which is currently around AUD $2137.

This is a smallish difference of around $283, but this is probably due to Microsoft pricing the tablet when the exchange rate was around $0.80 AUD to $1 NZD.

What I would expect, is that when they (eventually!) import additional stock to replenish supplies, the pricing should be re-adjusted to suit the current exchange rate – which is more around $0.95 AUD to $1 NZD.

Kiwi pricing is a bit more eh bru? 15% GST vs 10% GST in Australia is the biggest reason for the disparity.

Whether they do this or not, remains to be seen – but considering how expensive it is, if they can drop the price without impacting the profit margin it could only help make it more attractive.

For now, I’m just keeping an eye on the stock – in many ways not being able to buy one certainly helps the house fund, but the fact is that I need to upgrade my Lenovo laptop at some point in the next year at the latest. If Microsoft can sort out their stock issues, the Surface could well be that replacement.

Jethro does Mac: The Apple Input Devices

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With a change in job, I recently shifted from my primary work computer being a Lenovo X1 Carbon running GNU/Linux to using an Apple Macbook Pro Retina 15″ running MacOS.

It’s not the first time that I’ve used MacOS as my primary workstation, but I’ve spent the vast majority of my IT life working in a purely GNU/Linux environment so it was interesting having to try and setup my usual working habits and flow with this new platform.

I’m going to do a few blog posts addressing my thoughts and issues with this platform and how I’ve found it compared to my GNU/Linux laptops. I’m going to look at both hardware and software and note down a few fixes and tricks that I’ve learnt along the way.

Part 3: The Apple Input Devices

I’ll freely admit that I’m a complete and total keyboard snob and I’ve been spoilt with quality desktop keyboards (Das Keyboard, IBM Model M) and the best possible laptop keyboard on the market – the classic IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad keyboard (pre-chiclet style).

Keeping this snobbery and bias in mind, I’m bitterly disappointed by the quality of the Apple keyboard. It’s a surprising slip-up by a company that prides itself on perfection and brilliant hardware design, I fear that the keyboard is just an unfortunate casualty of that design-focused mentality.

I have two main issues with this keyboard. Firstly, the shallowness and feeling of the keys, and secondly the layout and key selection.

The shallowness is the biggest issue with the keyboard. Laptops certainly aren’t known for their key travel distance, but there have been a few exceptions to the rule – IBM/Lenovo’s Thinkpad series is widely recognised as featuring one of the better keyboards in the market with decent sized keys, good layout and enough key depth to get a reasonable amount of travel when typing. (Side note: talking about the classic Thinkpad keyboards here… I’m undecided about their new chiclet style keyboards on recent models…)

On the Macbook, the key depth and travel distance is very short, there’s almost no movement when pressing keys and I lose the ability to effectively bounce between the different keys. I personally find that repeatedly doing the small motions needed to type on this keyboard for 4 hours or more causes me physical discomfort in my hands and I fear that if I were to use the Macbook keyboard as my primary computer, I would be looking at long term RSI problems.

Having said that, to be fair to Apple I probably couldn’t handle more than 6-8 hours a day on my Thinkpad keyboard – whilst it’s better than the Apple one, it’s still fundamentally a laptop keyboard with all the limitations it suffers. Realistically, for the amount of time I spend on a computer (12+ hours a day), I require an external keyboard whether it’s plugged into a Macbook, a Thinkpad or some other abomination of typing quality.

The other issue I have with Apple’s keyboard is that despite the large size of the laptop (mine is a 15.6″ unit), they’ve compromised the keyboard layout and removed various useful keys – the ones that I miss the most are home, end, insert, delete, page up and page down, all of which require the use of key combinations to be achieved on the Macbook.

The Thinkpad line has always done pretty well at including these keys, even if they have a VERY annoying habit of moving around their positions with different hardware generations, and their presence on the keyboard is very appreciated when doing terminal work – which for me, is a fast part of my day. It’s a shame that Apple couldn’t have used a bit more of the surface space on the laptop to add some of these keys in.

Overall, if I examine the Macbook keyboard as something I’m only going to use when out of the home/work office, then it’s an acceptable keyboard. I’ve certainly used far worse laptop keyboards and it sure beats tapping away on a tablet touchscreen or using something like the Microsoft Surface foldout keyboards.

And of course both the Thinkpad and the Macbook pale in comparison to a proper external keyboard – as long as I have a decent home/work office external keyboard it’s not too much of a deal breaker, but I’d certainly weigh in the keyboard as a negative if I was considering a machine for a role as a travelling consultant, where I could be spending weeks at a client site with unknown facilities and maybe needing to rely on the laptop itself.

Despite the insistence of some people that the keyboard is the only thing a computer needs, you’ll probably also want to use some kind of cursor moving thing if you want to effectively make use of the MacOS GUI.

The Macbook ships with a large touchpad centered in the middle of the laptop beneath the keyboard. This is a pretty conventional design, although Apple has certainly been pushing the limits on getting the largest possible sized touchpad on a laptop – a trend that other vendors appear to have been following in recent years.

Personally I hold a controversial opinion where I vastly prefer Trackpoint-style pointers on laptops over touchpads. I’m sure that a case could be made to accuse me of Thinkpad fanboyism, but I’ve used and enjoyed Trackpoints on Toshiba, HP and Lenovo computers in the past with great success.

The fundamental reason I prefer the Trackpoint, is that whilst it takes longer to get used to and feels weird at first, once it’s mastered, it’s possible to rapidly jump between typing and cursor moving with minimal effort.

Generally my fingers are resting on keys right next to the Trackpoint, or sometimes even I rest my finger on the Trackpoint itself whilst waiting, so it’s easy to jump between typing and cursoring. Plus on the Thinkpad design, my thumb rests just above the 3-button mouse, which is fantastically convenient.

http://xkcd.com/243/

Whilst the Macbook’s large touchpad is by far the best touchpad I’ve ever used, it still has the fundamental flaw of the layout forcing me to make a large movement to go between the keyboard and the touchpad each time.

This is technically a Macbook air in the picture, but the keyboard and touchpad is the same across the entire product line…. this laptop was closer to my camera. :-)

It also has the issue of then sitting right in the way of my palm, so it took me a while to get used to not hitting the touchpad with my palm whilst typing. I’ve gotten better at this, although it still happens from time to time and does prevent me from resting my palm in my preferred natural position.

Admittedly I am nitpicking. To their credit, Apple has done a far better job of touchpads than most other vendors I’ve ever used. Generally laptop touchpads are too small (you can see how tiny the one on my Thinkpad is – I just disabled it entirely in favour of the Trackpoint) and even vendors who are busy cloning Apple’s design haven’t always gotten the same feel of sturdiness that Apple’s touchpad offers.

The gesture integration with MacOS is also excellent – I’ve found that I’m often using the three-finger swipe to switch between workspaces and the two-finger scrolling is very easy to use when doing web browsing, nicer and more natural feeling than using the cursor keys or a scroll wheel even.

Overall it’s a decent enough machine and beats most other laptop vendors in the market. I’d personally still go for the Thinkpad if all things other than keyboard were identical, simply due to how much I type and code, but the Macbook keyboard and touchpad is an acceptable second place for me and a good option for most general users.

See other posts in this series via the jethro does mac tag as I explore using MacOS after years of GNU/Linux only.

How Jethro Geeks – IRL

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A number of friends are always quite interested in how my personal IT infrastructure is put together, so I’m going to try and do one post a week ranging from physical environments, desktop, applications, server environments, monitoring and architecture.

Hopefully this is of interest to some readers – I’ll be upfront and advise that not everything is perfect in this setup, like any large environment there’s always ongoing upgrade projects, considering my environment is larger than some small ISPs it’s not surprising that there’s areas of poor design or legacy components, however I’ll try to be honest about these deficiencies and where I’m working to make improvements.

If you have questions or things you’d like to know my solution for, feel free to comment on any of the posts in this series. :-)

Today I’m examining my physical infrastructure, including my workstation and my servers.

After my move to Auckland, it’s changed a lot since last year and is now based around my laptop and gaming desktop primarily.

All the geekery, all the time

This is probably my most effective setup yet, the table was an excellent investment at about $100 off Trademe, with enough space for 2 workstations plus accessories in a really comfortable and accessible form factor.

My laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad X201i, with an Intel Core i5 CPU, 8GB RAM, 120GB SSD and a 9-cell battery for long run time. It was running Fedora, but I recently shifted to Debian so I could upskill on the Debian variations some more, particularly around packaging.

I tend to dock it and use the external LCD mostly when at home, but it’s quite comfortable to use directly and I often do when out and about for work – I just find it’s easier to work on projects with the larger keyboard & screen so it usually lives on the dock when I’m coding.

This machine gets utterly hammered, I run this laptop 24×7, typically have to reboot about once every month or so, usually from issues resulting with a system crash from docking or suspend/resume – something I blame the crappy Lenovo BIOS for.

I have an older desktop running Windows XP for gaming, it’s a bit dated now with only a Core 2 Duo and 3GB RAM – kind of due for a replacement, but it still runs the games I want quite acceptably, so there’s been little pressure to replace – plus since I only really use it about once a week, it’s not high on my investment list compared to my laptop and servers.

Naturally, there are the IBM Model M keyboards for both systems, I love these keyboards more than anything (yes Lisa, more than anything <3 ) and I’m really going to be sad when I have to work in an office with other people again whom don’t share my love for loud clicky keyboards.

The desk is a bit messy ATM with several phones and routers lying about for some projects I’ve been working on, I’ll go through stages of extreme OCD tidiness to surrendering to the chaos… fundamentally I just have too much junk to go on it, so trying to downsize the amount of stuff I have. ;-)

Of course this is just my workstations – there’s a whole lot going on in the background with my two physical servers where the real stuff happens.

A couple years back, I had a lab with 2x 42U racks which I really miss. These days I’m running everything on two physical machines running Xen and KVM virtualisation for all services – it was just so expensive and difficult having the racks, I’d consider doing it again if I brought a house, but when renting it’s far better to be as mobile as possible.

The primary server is my colocation box which runs in a New Zealand data center owned by my current employer:

Forever Alone :'( [thanks to my colleagues for that]

It’s an IBM xseries 306m, with 3.0Ghz P4 CPU, 8GB of RAM and 2x 1TB enterprise grade SATA drives, running CentOS (RHEL clone). It’s not the fastest machine, but it’s more than speedy enough for running all my public-facing production facing services.

It’s a vendor box as it enabled me to have 3 yrs onsite NBD repair support for it, these days I have a complete hardware spare onsite since it’s too old to be supported by IBM any longer.

To provide security isolation and easier management, services are spread across a number of Xen virtual machines based on type and risk of attack, this machine runs around 8 virtual machines performing different publicly facing services including running my mail servers, web servers, VoIP, IM and more.

For anything not public-facing or critical production, there’s my secondary server, which is a “whitebox” custom build running a RHEL/CentOS/JethroHybrid with KVM for virtualisation, running from home.

Whilst I run this server 24×7, it’s not critical for daily life, so I’m able to shut it down for a day or so when moving house or internet providers and not lose my ability to function – having said that, an outage for more than a couple days does get annoying fast….

Mmmmmm my beautiful monolith

This attractive black monolith packs a quad core Phenom II CPU, custom cooler, 2x SATA controllers, 16GB RAM, 12x 1TB hard drives in full tower Lian Li case. (slightly out-of-date spec list)

I’m running RHEL with KVM on this server which allows me to run not just my internal production Linux servers, but also other platforms including Windows for development and testing purposes.

It exists to run a number of internal production services, file shares and all my development environment, including virtual Linux and Windows servers, virtual network appliances and other test systems.

These days it’s getting a bit loaded, I’m using about 1 CPU core for RAID and disk encryption and usually 2 cores for the regular VM operation, leaving about 1 core free for load fluctuations. At some point I’ll have to upgrade, in which case I’ll replace the M/B with a new one to take 32GB RAM and a hex-core processor (or maybe octo-core by then?).

To avoid nasty sudden poweroff issues, there’s an APC UPS keeping things running and a cheap LCD and ancient crappy PS/2 keyboard attached as a local console when needed.

It’s a pretty large full tower machine, so I except to be leaving it in NZ when I move overseas for a while as it’s just too hard to ship and try and move around with it – if I end up staying overseas for longer than originally planned, I may need to consider replacing both physical servers with a single colocated rackmount box to drop running costs and to solve the EOL status of the IBM xseries.

The little black box on the bookshelf with antennas is my Mikrotik Routerboard 493G, which provides wifi and wired networking for my flat, with a GigE connection into the server which does all the internet firewalling and routing.

Other than the Mikrotik, I don’t have much in the way of production networking equipment – all my other kit is purely development only and not always connected and a lot of the development kit I now run as VMs anyway.

Hopefully this is of some interest, I’ll aim to do one post a week about my infrastructure in different areas, so add to your RSS reader for future updates. :-)

Lenovo & tp-fan fun

apt-get install debian

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Early last year I wrote how I was concerned about the progress and future of the CentOS project and was considering other options.

As of today, I’ve now shifted my primary workstation (Lenovo X201i laptop) from the somewhat out of date Fedora 13 over to Debian Stable/Squeeze.

The main drives for this change were:

Fedora 13 was out-of-date and lacking security fixes, hence requirement to upgrade.
The logical replacement, Fedora 16, now ships with GNOME 3 which I found to be buggy and a regression to my work flow and requirements (not going into details here, but essentially issues with dual screens, workspaces and customization of toolbars).
Desire to seriously try Debian as a primary system with the purpose of evaluating it’s suitability as a replacement for my CentOS servers.
Requirement for a distribution that made major release upgrades feasible (Fedora can do version jumps, but not recommended, making it a tricky process to find time to do a laptop upgrade/rebuild).
Distribution standardisation across my server & workstation environments.
I needed a full reinstall in order to downsize from a 320GB HDD to a 120GB SSD.
Reliability – my laptop is my primary business machine, if it doesn’t work, I’m going to be living on instant noodles until it starts working. Or even worse, work will buy me a Macbook to use like everyone else. :-/

I chose Debian particularly, since it would be a fine option for replacing my CentOS servers in the future with long life support & stability, it’s large package selection and the fact that it’s committed to freedom and openness (as is Fedora also); all of which made it more attractive than Ubuntu for me, which feels much more desktop and fast release focused.

So far, I’m loving it – the distribution is solid, well built and developer friendly, and the package selection is pretty decent, not to mention apt being nice and snappy (although the SSD sure helps there ;-)

I’ve had a couple minor issues relating to my Lenovo hardware that I’ve been able to resolve and have gotten into building a few Debian packages in order to backport newer versions of programs like Firefox/Iceweasel.

From what I’ve observed with playing with Debian today is that’s a pretty awesome distribution, but not entirely as perfect as some of it’s users like to make out:

The installer is a bit dated – not due to the text installer (I fucking love text installers! \m/), but rather due to it’s lack of support for WPA/2 wifi access points and also the ability to allow the user to make broken systems without warning (eg no /boot partition when you don’t have enough coffee like me).
Debian is often credited for having all the packages under the sun in it – whilst almost true, I did note that a number of my more obscure package choices didn’t exist, sending me running for my compiler a few times.
It would be nice if stable backports tracked some of the common packages that users like updated on older systems – programs like web browsers, instant messengers and maybe even kernels for uncooperative hardware. A user could avoid this by using Debian testing, but there are valid reasons to use stable + some backports over using testing or unstable.
I think rpm has nicer command line options for directly working with installed or to-be-installed packages than dpkg. Having said that, some of this could be user familiarity/likes, so time will tell as I use it more.

Over all though, these are minor issues – I think it’s a fantastic distribution with so much working out of the box, applications appearing well tested and good online documentation and resources.

I’m currently running trials and comparisons of Debian with my CentOS hosts with a view for replacing my current CentOS 5 instances with Debian Stable instances over a phased migration period, as well as testing features like LDAP authentication and KVM, but it’s looking pretty damn good so far.

At this stage I’ve only used CentOS 6 as a KVM host platform and it seems unlikely I’ll end up deploying any CentOS 6 VMs with all the security update release slowness. With only a couple servers on CentOS 6 altogether, I’m pondering switching them over to Debian sooner rather than later to reduce maintenance efforts.

[FYI, this post isn’t intended as an attack/demands at the CentOS developers, rather it’s recognizing they’re a volunteer team and probably lacking resource – and I thank them for their efforts, but it appears long term it’s not a good option for my requirements.]

It does also raise questions about Red Hat’s RHEL future with engineers like myself – with Red Hat no longer offering a free-as-in-beer-with-no-support option and CentOS being too slow, more geeks like myself might move to Debian. And if we do so, when the next enterprise project comes along, will we be recommending RHEL or Debian?

Red Hat offers the advantage of commercial support, but for a company with their own engineers, Debian may be more appropriate and budget friendly.

Thinkpad Wireless Headaches

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Last year I obtained a new Lenovo x201i laptop to replace my aging Libretto – it’s been going pretty well, with one glaring exception – thanks to the “Thinkpad Wireless” 802.11n wifi card.

Lenovo sell their laptops with several wifi options – I didn’t do my research into the differences at the time and went for the default – turns out that “Thinkpad Wireless” is actually an Realtek RTL8192SE card.

This card has wonderful features like:

Unreliable and out-of-upstream Linux drivers – I find that currently I can only use version linux_2.6.0018.1025.2010, any other version introduces even more extreme unreliability.
Inability to stay reliability connected at 40Mhz band when available, instead jumping between 20Mhz and 40Mhz frequently.
When connected to an Apple Airport wireless access point, it will like to randomly drop the connection and re-connect every hour or so.
When connected to an Engenius wireless access point, it will work fine for 90% of traffic – but inexplicably, drops packets to just a select number of websites.
When connected to a Mikrotik R52 access point, it will work fine sometimes, but at other times suffers latency on all traffic types of around 5,000milliseconds (that’s 5 seconds for a packet return trip!)

I use my laptop a lot – pretty much 12 hours+ a day, at work, at home and on the go and have had nothing but problems with this wireless card on access points wherever I go, so I know it’s not AP, or even interference, specific.

So I made the decision to replace the card with something decent, ordering myself an Intel 633ANHMW mini-pcie card – low profile to fit into the laptop easily, and with support for 802.11n in both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz ranges .

I had *hoped* to get this card to not only resolve my reliability issues, but also to provide more performance and to allow me to move my wifi network to 5Ghz to get around frequency clashes at the flat.

Except that I can’t – Lenovo have locked the BIOS on these laptops, so that only official Lenovo cards are permitted to be used.

I couldn’t even *boot* the laptop without removing the card – even disabling the card in the BIOS will still throw up the same “Error 1802 : unauthorized network card is plugged in – Power off and remove the miniPCI network card” error. :-(

Turns out that this is a long known issue with IBM’s (and now Lenovo’s) laptop series – many different workarounds have been developed for it:

Linux-based C application to change a bit in the BIOS to disable the check – sadly, doesn’t work on the X201i.
Taping over pin 20 and installing into the WWAN slot – unfortunately I’m using the slot already for the WWAN card, so no good to me.
Patching the BIOS with a hex editor to disable the whitelist.

That last one should work even for me – there’s annacdotial evidence floating around online suggesting it’s possible…

But it’s too risky – this is a work laptop, I can’t afford to be without it, and bricking the BIOS by making a mistake will leave me with a very expensive repair bill.

I ended up ranting about the issue on Twitter and @Lenovo_ANZ send me a message asking for more information about the problem – this has lead to an email conversation with them, but I’m not too optimistic about a large company being able to change their policies based on customer feedback.

All I know is, I’d be very, very, weary about buying anything made by Lenovo ever again – if I’m going to get locked down unchangable hardware, I might as well consider other vendors making shinier equipment, or go for someone like Dell who don’t seem to lock the wifi cards.

Pretty unhappy with it right now…. only options left seem either to buy a vastly over priced Lenovo branded Intel card, or go with an Expresscard device, such as an Ubiquiti SR71-X.

Will update this page with where I get to with Lenovo, if I don’t demolish my laptop in frustration first.