Installing Ubuntu 8.04 on my Thinkpad
Posted on | June 24, 2008 | Comments
I had an old(er) Thinkpad T42p gathering dust, and I’ve wanted to kick Ubuntu a bit, so I chose to install the 8.04 disto on this laptop. I couldn’t believe how smooth the install went. By default, it wasn’t completely optimized, and it was certainly functional. It was cake to add my networked printer just by handing the installer the printer’s IP address.
I even found a site that lists some of the Thinkpad-specific optimizations available. So far, everything is running great. The power management doesn’t look quite as aggressive as under Windows, and I’ll live with that.
Firefox 3.0 came as part of this install, so getting online was smooth. I’ve installed a few extensions, including ScribeFire, and I can’t really tell that I’m not on my Windows box anymore. I’m using Scribefire to create and post this entry now.
I’ve got to show this to some of my friends working on Windows - this will blow their minds (in a good way)…
Technorati Tags: ubuntu, thinkpad
links for 2008-06-24
Posted on | June 24, 2008 | Comments
Goodreads.com - a great place for discovering books
Posted on | June 22, 2008 | Comments
I think the folks at my local library are on to me. The King County Library offers a wonderful service - I can log on to their site, search the entire catalog, and have any book/cd/audiobook/dvd/etc that one of the libraries has delivered to my local library in Bellevue.
Lately I’ve been adding folks to my Goodreads friends list. Think of Goodreads as FriendFeed for Amazon - I can read reviews and ratings from just the folks I choose. This morning’s find was a book I read a long time ago, and I need to read again - Garry Wills’ “Lincoln at Gettysburg” - a wonderful analysis of the speech that always reminds me how wonderful the gift of powerful oratory skills can be to a person.
Do yourself a favor - set up an account on Goodreads. I’m “shawnmor” on Goodreads if you’d like to add me as a friend.
links for 2008-06-21
Posted on | June 21, 2008 | Comments
links for 2008-06-18
Posted on | June 18, 2008 | Comments
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the hack to turn extension compat check off in Firefox…
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must have…
links for 2008-06-17
Posted on | June 17, 2008 | Comments
links for 2008-06-16
Posted on | June 16, 2008 | Comments
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Wow… I still can’t believe Tim Russert passed away. I’ll miss his voice on Sunday mornings…
Best Memory of Dad - Happy Father’s Day
Posted on | June 15, 2008 | Comments
“Would you like to see what I do when I go to work?” After I finished peeing all over myself, I raced out to the car. Dad was taking me to LTV (aerospace company in Dallas, TX). I knew he did something with these things called computers, and I had no idea what that meant. I received the full treatment - guest badge and all. I got to sit at Dad’s desk, call Mom (just like he did), and even write all over the walls (two of the walls in his office were dry-erase boards). I got to write all over this cool green-and-white striped paper, and draw funny boxes and triangles using these really cool green stencils that had “IBM” on them.
Then the moment that sealed my professional fate. I got to go into the computer room. Just like the gal in the picture, I got to sit at a teletype terminal, and play a game on the computer. I got to load a tape onto a tape drive, and see where the disk drives were. I was in heaven. The soft hum of the A/C system, the whir of the disk drives, the zzzt-zzzt of the tape drives, the smell of the room - I can remember it all like it was yesterday. The icing on the cake - I got to take a stack of cards from the card punch home with me. Years later, when I found a box of unused cards from an old card punch when I started working at IBM, no one could figure out why I was so excited, and I had a hard time telling them, since I had instantly been transformed back into an over-stimulated 7-yr old geek.
Thanks for making that day special, Dad. I hope the mainframes in Heaven are even more fun. Happy Father’s Day, fellow dads.
links for 2008-06-14
Posted on | June 14, 2008 | Comments
links for 2008-06-10
Posted on | June 10, 2008 | Comments