All posts by keith

General

A thing

The black ship strode through the charcoal night. It carried no cargo except the horrid crew, made up of the riffraff of many worlds. Big, small, short, tall, one-eyed, three-eyed, no-eyed… Dressed, and undressed in various costumes of their native worlds.
It criss-crossed the world bringing strangeness with it, and it had but one purpose on this night, and ran full speed for the bright lights of the nearest port.

The ship hit the shore, and the crew streamed down the gangplanks, and ran up the streets.
Everywhere could be heard the sound of fists banging on doors, and the cries of TRICK OR TREAT!!!!
It was a good night.

Happy Halloween, everyone.

system76 computer

The new laptop

So I’ve had the new laptop for 2 weeks now, and I ‘m loving it.
Here’s some pics of the unveiling:
Packaging
The box it came in–it was packaged nice and safe.
All the stuff that came with the laptop
All the stuff that came in the box. Powercord, etc. It included a CD for the drivers for the laptop–handy if you want to put Windows on it, but useless otherwise.
side view
Side view showing the dvd-rw/cd-rw.
The lid
The lid–note the lack of system 76 logo. I was kinda disappointed by that, because I wante people to know where I got this monster of a laptop. I emailed S76 support, and they are printing up lables of their logo, and will send me one when that’s done.
keyboard
Here’s the keyboard. Very nice, and responsive. The extra buttons work, unless you screw them up, like I did. On the top, one launches browser, one launches email, one launches totem, one launches rhythmbox, and one mutes the sound. Since I can’t stand totem, or rhythmbox, and took both them off my computer, those ones don’t work anymore, and, I’d like to see something that launches the default players instead. (I’ve found out that you can actually do this yourself, using gconf, and may be that S76’s way is fine for most users.) On the left side there’s two buttons, one of which supposedly charges your battery faster, and the other lets you charge usb connected things (like personal music players) while the lpatop is powered down–now that’s a cool feature.

This is a widescreen laptop, and I’ still getting used to that, it’s actually pretty sweet. The problem with that is that the ubuntu live CD needs some extra config to get it to display a gui, since the screen dimensions aren’t picked up in xorg.conf (because the live CD doesn’t have the drivers for the chip on the Pangolin). It’s a pain, but not a real big one.

Other than the aforementioned bugs my other complaints are that they use an LVM file system with one partition (I like to partition my drive so that the /home partition is separate from the root partition, so that it’s easier/safer to reinstall/upgrade), the reason for that is to make suspend/hibernate work, but it does make repartitioning a bitch.
Also the card reader doesn’t work, but I have it from good authority that it will real soon.