His Deeds Are Dust

Manx, my catalogue of online manuals for old computers, is now dead. There are several reasons for this.

The most important reason is that I haven’t had time to maintain it for the last couple of years, and priorities in my life have changed so far that I don’t imagine I’ll ever get back to it. If I left the database online, it would only disappoint people as the catalogue covered a decreasing percentage of the available scanned documentation.

Unfortunately, when it was maintained, it was by a set of arcane scripts and command line wizardry that went straight to the database. There never was any decent graphical interface, and therefore there isn’t anything to pass to another maintainer. They’d either have to follow the same painful route as me, or spend a lot of time coding an interface.

I should have coded a graphical interface to allow people to contribute to the database a long time ago, but I don’t have much evidence of interest in its development. Many years ago, I received a few requests for copies of the database, and I sent them out. I also put database dumps online, so if anyone fancied building tools and feeding back the results, they could do so. However, I never heard from anyone who found them useful, or had any ideas for improvements.

Another reason for its demise is that Google is now OCRing scanned material, which will eventually make all of these archives searchable. Of course that isn’t the same as a catalogue, but the main purpose of putting documents online is to make them findable by, and useful to, more people. Cataloguing appeals to my desire to put things in order, but it isn’t a big thrill, as hobbies go. I’d rather work on attaining Shodan.

My lovely Sony Vaio VGN-TX1XP partially died last week, after I managed to drop it while fumbling for the keys to my car. The keyboard doesn’t work, though the touchpad is fine, and the wireless doesn’t work. Ho hum. I’ll have a look at fixing it later, but I really can’t do without a laptop, so I had a look for another one to fill its place.

My selection criterion for a laptop is very simple: it’ll be exactly A4 size. Any smaller than that and I won’t be able to type on it; any larger and I won’t want to carry it around in my rucksack. I looked at the natural replacement for my old TX1 from Sony, but that cost £1600 at the time, and they still cost over £1300, so I discounted them.

I decided on the Samsung NP-X120-FA03UK, at a shade under £500. I ordered it on Monday from Laptops Direct and it got here yesterday afternoon.

I had been using Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron on my Vaio. This is despite using Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora at work, and Fedora at home on my desktop. I picked Ubuntu because the wireless worked straight away, whereas on Fedora it did nothing at all.

However, a few years on, I’m happy enough with Fedora 11 on my desktop, so it is time to try it again, because I’d rather learn one way of administering things on all my machines. The X120 doesn’t have an optical drive, so I hooked up a USB DVD drive, changed the boot order in the BIOS, and inserted a Fedora 11 disk. At the first reboot after partitioning, there were some problems, which I think I recall seeing mentioned on the mailing lists, so I simply went through that stage again (at just a few minutes’ cost), and it worked second time.

After package installation, and booting into my new OS, I found that the wireless didn’t work. Even turning off security wouldn’t allow it to connect, so I hooked up an Ethernet cable and performed an update. After that, it works perfectly.

This is the first laptop I’ve had with an HDMI output. I had a very quick play with that this morning, but didn’t get any output on my TV. I’ll try playing with that later.