His Deeds Are Dust

As suspected, the Samsung X120 notebook has the same keyboard quirks as many other Samsung laptops, so that some of the function keys don’t work correctly under Fedora 11. There are two problems and fixes needed. One, the kernel needs patching so that the quirks with missing key release events are also applied to the X120 (kernel bug 14052). Secondly, HAL needs patching to connect the function keys to turn the brightness up and down, etc., in the manner described by Fedora bug 504009 and Ubuntu bug 399911 (and many others).

However, I have confirmed that grabbing and patching kernel-2.6.30.9-90.fc11.src.rpm works me.

I’ve just charged my notebook’s battery fully, then allowed it to discharge while the machine was idle. First of all, I nobbled the power management settings in Fedora 11 to make sure that the screen stayed bright throughout, and it didn’t perform a neat shutdown when it guessed the battery was close to death.

I have the four cell Li-Ion battery, product ID AA-PB0TC4L, which Samsung claims will last four hours, based on BatteryMark tests.

It took 1 hour 53 minutes to discharge.

I present this figure without further comment because I don’t know whether this type of battery takes a few charge/discharge cycles to gain a longer life, or any other possible explanations.

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.