The Traveling Linux Laptop Adventure

In my last several posts I was looking at OpenSUSE 10.3 on the Dell D620 laptop. It was my original intention to leave 10.3 on the D620 when I traveled to Pune India this week. When it came down to the wire though, I decided that I needed to be sure that my laptop was 100% for the next two weeks, and did not have time to mess any further with 10.3.

This is not a strong indictment of 10.3. I expect when I get off the road and have a moment to install it on my IBM T41 that it will work flawlessly. 10.3 had many good things about it and I would like to explore it more, but I was nervous about relying on it specifically on the D620 hardware while I was on the road. I thought briefly about taking the T41 with me and doing the install while traveling, but I already had my personal Apple in the backpack, and with the D620, it was full. No room for another, not to mention what a pain it is to take the laptops through airport security. Two laptops in one backpack are not light either.

This week I am in Pune, India, where BMC has an office. R&D Support has a team here, and I am here to work on various teamwork related issues that in part includes a global rollout of ITSM Version 7. I am not really spending much time thinking about Linux per-se, more ITIL than anything else. It was the need to not have to worry about laptop issues that drove me to converting the D620 at the last minute back to Mint.

While I was at it, I went ahead and grabbed the new 3.1 version. I knew 3.0 worked well on the D620, and so just sort of assumed 3.1 would as well. That has in fact been the case, and the laptop has largely faded over the last week into just being a device I need to do my job while on the road.

Evolution has to be working of course, and Mint 3.1 still ships version 2.10 by default. Ubuntu 7.10 has 2.12, but Mint 4.0 based off 7.10 won't be out till November.

OpenSUSE had Evo 2.12 out before Ubuntu, and I was loath to move back to 2.10 since that was a thing that was working fairly well for me under OpenSUSE. It was a tug of war between a fairly well working Evo 2.12 on a not working as well OpenSUSE versus A well working Mint and a downlevel but working Evolution. I finally went with the Mint's mental comfort of knowing I would not be having any D620 specific issues when I had no time to work on them. I needed Linux and Evolution to "Just Work"(tm).

Being literally on the other side of the planet from where the MS Exchange server that stores my email was a lingering concern, given my recent spate of Evo-related issues. As part of the old joke goes, IBM has been working on upgrading the speed of light but has not yet succeeded (A CMG bit of humor about issues involved in extra-galactic memory page swapping). Adding in a quarter second round trip to each packet of the server-to-client email conversation was probably not going to enhance the stability of Evo. As my mother says, this was a "Wasted Worry"(TM, My mom). Evolution 2.10 under Mint 3.1 is fast, and stable even when accessing MS Exchange on the far side of the Earth.

I planned to be hooking up to projectors while here to go through some Wiki doc with the team. That one factor more than anything else is what tipped my decision to load Mint. I am sure OpenSUSE can do this too, but I was having trouble with it. Given time, I could have figured it out, but I was out of runway. Well. I needed to be on the runway for the mind-and-seat-numbing 20+ hour flight. I knew Mint handled external monitor switching on the D620 without issue, so I went with it. Sure enough, I needed to hook up to this previously-unknown-to-me projector, and sure enough, it all worked fine. It even handled the difference between a 1440x900 internal panel and a 1024x768 external projector without major issue.

Something Mint Did Not Handle

Lest I be considered a Mint Pollyanna, I should note that Mint did not handle a Dell docking station with complete poise. I was assigned a place to sit here, and my workspace included a Dell docking station plus external monitor. This eased the power cord issues (110v plug tips in a 220v country: Yes, I have an adapter. But who wants to crawl under the desk every day to plug in! There is 220v down there!). I took a moment to try and set up dual head mode, and run with both panels. Thanks for playing. But no.

Mint did tell me that it could not validate the config I was using, but I told it to go ahead anyway. Silly Geek. X crashed, and would not return till I deleted /etc/X11/xorg.conf and let a reboot rebuild the file.

Fine. I'll just use the dock as a charging station then.

Having said that, here is something it did handle in the same docking department. I was going to hot plug into the dock, and someone standing with me at the time told me "That won't work. You need to shut down first!". They have XP on a D620, and the same dock as this one. I plugged in, and the screen went black. "I told you so" look was delivered by special airmail. I pressed Fn-f8, the screen returned, and Owl delivering the post took off realizing they were not in the right place. OK, it wasn't really that dramatic. Can't resist a good Harry Potter reference though. Apparently this hotdock operation does not work on XP, or at least not well. Surprise!

I've Got the Power

The D620 came with the small four cell battery. There is an optional six cell, but I don't have it. Under MSWin XP, the undocked time when being actively used, panel fully bright, is about two hours. Under OpenSUSE is was about that too. Under Mint, it is more like three. Better CPU throttling, or different services started or what... I don't know why it is different. It is not something I expected. Still, I need to get the six cell battery, because that would be "Even Better"(tm).

Another Dimension

As I have noted in my personal blog, I am not a big user of all the 3D desktop stuff. On OpenSUSE, Compiz Fusion was a recipe for frequent X restarts on the D620. I assume that is all tied back to the graphics card issues I was having. Beryl under Mint works all day long every day though, so the few features that I really do like (f9 "Expose", task bar hover for window preview) are available.

Next Journey

I leave Pune next Tuesday, arrive home Wednesday, and then fly again the following Monday. This time will be to Vancouver for BMC Userworld. I have never been to a Userworld before, and I am looking forward to it.

I am feeling a slight tug towards trying Ubuntu 7.10 for that leg of the trip: Based off the Dell Mint experience, and what I have read of 7.10, it should work fine. But I still need a trouble free experience so I can focus on the event, so ... who knows.

That is on the other side of a long plane ride, where I will have plenty of time to think about it.