Wednesday, July 25th, 2012

	Laptop crisis and how I did solve it
	~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Once upon a time there was a period of my life, when I had only a
laptop computer and I was happy. No noisy boxes under the table, no
cable mess, no problems. But after I learned, that I like to fiddle
with things and I like to see inside them, I went back to desktop
computers. Now I have three desktops, all working in the way it suits
my taste.

I also happen to have three laptops, but the situation with them is
completely different. For the first time in last eight years I didn't
know what to take with me on vacation, because none of them was
working properly.

You probably picture the right vacation as the time of leisure, lying
on the beaches, drinking mojitos and doing nothing. That is not
exactly my case. Since 2004 I attend ShuCon party, which is vacation
of czech and slovak ZX Spectrum users. We have a rented cottage in
White Carpathians, make trips to the mountains, visit swimming pool,
hunt geocaches, watch movies etc. And when coding idea emerges, it
needs to be programmed right in that moment.

So, what's wrong with my laptops?

PowerBook G4 
Until my last vacation my primary laptop. But on that last vacation it
begun to crash randomly, when connected to wireless network provided
by the latest AirPort Extreme station. I thought it was logic board
failure, so we dismantled PowerBook to the very last screw and
replaced the board with a spare one. New board unfortunately had
broken Ethernet connector, so we soldered a new one from the
"malfunctional" board and there the problems started. Since RoHS,
American and European soldering materials are not compatible and after
I plugged two times ethernet cable in and out, connector detached from
the board. Another problems emerged with heating. We did not have
thermal paste (who does on vacation in the mountains?), so we used the
old one. Now GPU has 70C most of the time and you really can't use
that on your lap, if you know, what I mean.

PowerBook G3
I bought this one for my computer collection and was surprised how
good and fast machine that is. It's in working condition, but it has
no battery and since the HDD was broken, I installed CompactFlash card
instead of it. CF card is faster than the old HDD, completely silent
and draws less power. On the other hand - the HDD does have keyboard
supporting function. Now the right part of my keyboard is moving
couple of milimeters up and down with every keystroke and that is
annoying as hell. The first problem should be solved by a new battery,
I ordered from PRC. The second is in process of finding used 2.5" IDE
HDD in good condition and that is not as easy as it used to be ten
years ago. Also, charger plug does not have its original plastic
cover, so just a simple pulling of the cable and it's all over. I can
use it on my table, but not in place, where people run around me, not
looking where they set their feet.

Efika MX Smartbook 
The only of my portables, which had - aside from design flaws - no
hardware problems. It had just one giant software problem called
Ubuntu. With Gnome it was slow as hell, with XFce it was much better,
but still consuming too much of my precious 800MHz ARM CPU and 512MB
non-expandable, on-logicboard-soldered memory. Sad but true - slow
software kills computer as well as broken hardware.

My original post was intended to end here with "problem not solved"
status. But then ghost in the machine appeared - I discovered that
there is a working port of Debian for Efika MX and gave it a try.
After about twenty minutes of installation from SD card, system booted
and the same Gnome hell appeared. I deleted and purged everything that
had Gnome in the package name and configured pure X Window System with
dwm window manager. Wow! Boot in 20 seconds, "startx" command is
finished under 3 seconds. That's what I call fast computer. Kernel
definitely has its problems - i.e. you cannot play video and if you
try, computer freezes - but it works well as a programmer's machine,
music player and web browsing device. Exactly what I needed and
wanted.

So it has a happy end after all and even a few kilobytes of working
Perl code has been written in those mountains.
.