Dixons, beside the usual netbooks with their crippled Windows 7
'Starter' edition and deliberately crippling measly 1GB of memory was
this slightly larger machine physically but with a much better spec.
AMD Vision APU, 4GB memory instead of just 1 and a 320GB disk.
Promised battery life was over 5 hours. All this for only an extra £30
over the netbook price thanks to a 'Huge' sale discount.
I have been after another netbook for a while as I lent my trusty Dell
Inspiron 910 to my daughter. I wanted something with the processing
power and disk storage to let me do Livestreaming as has been
popularised by the Occupy movement. My big laptop with a barley 3
hours battery life at best would have been a bit bulky for this.
I got the Ideapad just a couple of days before the 11th Feb Stop ACTA
so there was no time to replace Windows with Linux for that. With the
help of the Occupy LSX tech team I managed to get livestreaming set up
under Windows. By the time it was working however I realised that
running an external USB camera and a 3G dongle also soaks up battery
life! I was down to 45mins of power before the march had even started!
I thought I had a solution to this in that I had noticed in the local
Maplins to St. Pauls that they have a rather natty 12v lead battery
and 200w mains inverter package for under £50. About the size and
shape as a yellow plastic lunch box but MUCH heavier!
The power pack seemed to have some charge in it so I loaded it into my backpack and started off the march from St. Pauls to Trafalgar Square with operational (and watched) livestream feed.
The problem was that the initial charge in the power pack was not that great so by the time I reached the square the power had drained. I then found from the instructions that a full initial charge is about 26 hours.
It will come in handy for next time. There are lighter and higher capacity solutions for just powering phones and netbooks for extended periods. The key Livestreamers in the states use them, but the disadvantage is that they are very expensive. The simple lead acid battery can power your laptop for another 3 hours or so which should be enough. If you are a glutton for weight carrying it is possible to attach a bigger external battery to the inverter too.
Although it was a novelty to use Windows (this is my first Win7 machine) I did not want it to be the ONLY OS on there.
320GB disk! I thought there would be plenty of space to put several choices of Linux distro on there. However when I booted Linux from a USB disk to do some initial compatibility testing I found that the partition table had been laid out with NO spare space!
sda1 is win boot partition 200M 29M used NTFS
sda2 is win main partition 22G used 233G free NTFS
sda3 is an extended partition containing sda5
sda5 is LENOVO 29G 1.3G used 28G free NTFS
sda4 is LENOVO_PART 15G 8.3G used 6.4G free NTFS - looks like recovery
copy of Windows OS, compressed.
85% wasted space on boot partition
95% wasted space on a whole partition just used for Lenovo specific
drivers and other gunk.
The sda4 partition is a special recovery one. If a special recessed button on the Ideapad keyboard is pressed this is the means by which a trashed copy of Windows can be rebuilt.
Looks like Windows was doing the equivalent of stretching out all over the couch to stop someone else sitting down.
As I was already running Linux from a nice big USB disk my first task was to save compressed images of these partitions so that I could reset things if things did not go to plan.
I used dd piped to gzip for each one with 4k block size onto usb external disk. This took quite a while but left me reasonably confident that I could get thing back again if my experiments with Linux caused data loss.
The next thing I tried was a Fedora Core 16 install. I attempted to shrink the main windows partition but doing this gave a runtime error, not good. What was worse was that booting Windows again pronounced the installation unfixable. If I had not taken those initial backups I would have been one unhappy bunny at this point!
As there was nothing left to loose I did a whole disk install if FC16. This worked well, much nicer than Windows but with a couple of issues. I could not get the WiFi working! This was a bit of a shock for a Lenovo product as I am used to the Thinkpad range generally being rock solid, no hassles, performers with Linux. The Ideapad Wifi is one of those 'it nearly works' issues for which there is more than one solution offered on the web. I tried them all but never actually got a
working connection. The other thing not working at all is the SD card slot. For this I could not even find any solutions! This is a great shame as on my previous two netbooks I have been used to the luxury of being able to install the OS to SD cards and thus return to the care-free time of the floppy disk by being able to swap between whole personalities just by swapping out a small piece of plastic!
The issues were bugging me so much I decided to use my backups and return the machine to the servitude of running Windows. For some reason a direct byte for byte recopying of the boot and main partitions did not give me a bootable system. I can only imagine I had missed some small but vital bit of copy protection. Luckily the restored recovery partition worked as the handbook said it did.
Pressing the special button with a pen enabled me to get back to the state of the system as delivered.
Hardly ideal, because of being bogged down with Anti Virus vigilance needs, but I then tried the Windows version of the VirtualBox VM system that is standard on Ubuntu. It is an easy download for Windows and I soon had a virtual box version of FC16 running under Windows 7. There were a couple of problems though. Firstly I was stuck with a 1024x768 sized screen and secondly the video performance was dire. The FC16 virtual machine could not even play Youtube videos without staggering. I have the same VirtualBox software running on my Linux desktop and client systems there have no problem playing Youtube movies.
At the moment I am concluding that this is all due to the runtime weight of having to run Anti Virus.
I do need to keep some Windows capability for occasional use but I still need to find a way of shrinking the main partition reliably. The default scheme Lenovo has chosen for this machine is very wasteful.
I called this a love/hate relationship.
On the plus side I think the machine is good value for £280. It is light with a great keyboard and reasonable battery life.
On the minus side Lenovo REALLY SHOULD make sure that all their range work properly with Linux, otherwise they are throwing away all the years of good name of years of the IBM then Lenovo Thinkpad.
This was an impulse buy on the strength of the brand name. I have learned to always do research into a particular machine I am buying.
Every PC buyer should insist 100% on proper Linux compatibility. Otherwise you are just getting an appliance, not a true general purpose computer.
The usb external disk with PC LinuxOS on it that I used to do the backups seems to boot faster than Win7 too! So installing Linuxes to usb and running them there is always an option, just not as tidy. Just a shame about that SD card not being standard. A 32GB SD card for main OS work and the big disk spun up only for playing media etc would be ideal.
No comments:
Post a Comment