Sunday, June 06, 2010

Upgrading the T42p to Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (10.04 LTS)

A week or so ago I upgraded my IBM ThinkPad T42p(which is a very good laptop for a (now) very fair price of ~400 Euro on ebay) to Ubuntu Lucid.
Upgrade ran quite easily although the upgrade application had some visual bugs, but everything harmless. I hadn't enough space left on the first try, so it was time to delete some "garbage" applications (a good moment to do so :)). A big minus was that you cannot leave the installation unattended because sometimes windows pop up asking regarding this or that package. Okay in a way this makes sense, but why isn't the installations first simulated? The user could be asked for decisions which are then remembered to go through the upgrade process silently...

Well, after everything was done, I rebooted. I counted from splash screen on and didn't came to 10 until the login screen showed up.

First thing I discovered was that the backlight was dark and if setting to maximum via function keys, it went dark again after a while. Luckily I'm not the only one with this issue. Found a temporary fix on some ubuntu forum and everything is fine again now :) I also removed the PPA version of Firefox and Thunderbird to install the stable ones(much better regarding Firefox - I once had to use Opera for 3 weeks!) and everything is running fine again :)
I even discovered that Rhythmbox is a very good and nice replacement for Wine + Foobar 2000 (which runs nicely but has no "from system to playlist" file drag & drop). One thing it lacks of is silence skipping.
In foobar there is a plugin where pieces of a track are skipped if they are below a volume level (e.g. -48 dB) for a certian time, which is really useful for tinier DJ-ing. You can put a 10 seconds crossfade and a 3 Second silence detection for below said -48 dB and foobar could become a good replacement of a hundred bucks audio software for smaller parties.

Next thing to do is to extend the home partition on LVM, it is running out of space with no chance to save some any more....

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