March 23rd, 2009 by Stargazer
Lenovo W500 – So far so good
Since I am able to use my Lenovo ThinkPad, it’s time to have a look at the result now. Talking about Windows, it’s just the usual ranting – no bigger problems, disregarding the common ranting that Windows is not GNU. Regarding Linux, there’s a bit more to say, but in general, nothing really disturbing – at least nothing I can’t live with.
Tags: setup, gentoo, lenovo, W500
Posted in: IT Related stuff | 1 Comment »
Lenovo W500 – Part 5
March 19th, 2009 by Stargazer
Today I decided to get the webcam working which can be found above the display, integrated into the case. Fact is, I haven’t really looked at the device, as it wasn’t listed as such. As there are no unknown devices at the PCI bus, we can narrow our search to the USB bus which looks like that:
Tags: setup, gentoo, lenovo, W500
Posted in: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Lenovo W500 – Part 4
March 18th, 2009 by Stargazer
After all, the current state of my notebook could be considered as ‘usable’ but not ‘fully working’, due to some components that still are unused or not configured. While looking at the components I stumbled over the hdaps thingy which should save your harddisk from headcrashes.
Tags: setup, gentoo, lenovo, W500
Posted in: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Lenovo W500 – Part 3
March 16th, 2009 by Stargazer
After the first installation steps were done, it was time to get Xorg running, which reminds us of one of the oddities of this notebook. Remember, we have to VGA cards here.
But it would be too simple if things are working out of the box. The ATI binary drivers forced me to rebuild the kernel a couple of times to correct some braindamaged settings only ati uses. As this was done, I was really excited to launch Xorg but ended up with a stack trace.
Tags: setup, ati, gentoo, lenovo, W500
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Lenovo W500 – Part 2
March 12th, 2009 by Stargazer
As the windows part was done, it is time to do the productive environment used for work – Gentoo Linux. As already mentioned in one of my previous posts, we are talking about a 64bit system. But before watching the GCC output, it’s time to look at some specs and hints. I’ll start with the CPU which specs look quite impressive to me:
Tags: setup, gentoo, lenovo, W500
Posted in: IT Related stuff | 4 Comments »
Lenovo W500 – Part 1
March 10th, 2009 by Stargazer
As my old notebook got to slow for my taste, I went out for getting me a new one. But that wasn’t a easy as suspected. After some time of comparing and reading reviews I have decided to go with a Lenovo W500, which is one of those systems that can be hardly wrecked.
The preinstalled OS is Windows Vista Business and a rescue system which should work on a single button click to restore the ‘factory defaults’ if needed. The display shows a resolution of 1920×1200 px and the VGA card assures enough power.
Tags: setup, lenovo, W500, windows
Posted in: IT Related stuff | 4 Comments »
IE6 blues
March 2nd, 2009 by Stargazer
It’s one if the most common problems with the old internet explorer that it handles the box model in a wrong way and I have been cursing for hours due to that problem. To be able to do some workarounds, Microsoft offers browser switching for their browser (IE only) for loading different stylesheets:
<!–[if IE 6]>
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”/css/only_ie6.css” type=”text/css” />
<![endif]–>
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