I’ve decided to give Arch Linux a try and went on to install it on the Lenovo (IBM) Thinkpad X220 (Sandy Bridge i7). I have, once again, used LVM over LUKS (over the Crucial M4 SSD) and Gnome Shell. Here is a short summary of what I have found to be quite practical.
I recommend reading my post regarding the X200 with Fedora 16 for some nice powersaving features and the ThinkLight in Pidgin.
One of the features I’ve really been missing in Gnome 3 (and Gnome 2, too) for a long time is the ability to directly jump to a given window by using a key combination. Some other desktop environments offer such a feature per default: Unity uses META+[NUMBERKEY] as it maintains a globally unique window order ([NUMBERKEY] signifies an application’s position on the panel), similarly to Windows 7, which uses the same key combination. KDE4, on the other hand side, does not maintain a strict order amongst all running applications on all workspaces etc, but it allows users to define a per application shortcut, enabling you to jump to the first launched window of that application (I like this feature very much 
).
Well, Gnome Shell, to my knowledge, does not offer any corresponding function. I think it would be possible to implement it the Unity way, given the fact that Gnome Shell’s Activities Dock does offer an application order, but I’m not that much into the code yet to implement it myself. Instead, I proceeded the KDE4 way and used a very nice and powerful tool, wmctrl. The following is a generic, desktop environment independent solution, as it is based upon executing a script which can be simply bound to a key combination in most DEs. The script checks whether a given application is running and switches to it; if it isn’t, it launches it. Proceed as follows.
I’ve recently bought a Lenovo (IBM) Thinkpad X220 (Sandy Bridge i7) and installed Fedora 16 onto it. I’ve used an encrypted (LUKS) LVM containing my root, swap and data partitions which I’m very satisfied with. In this post, I’ll gather things that might be of your interest for this hardware-software configuration.
If you’re experiencing a delay when connecting to an IPv4-only network (LAN or WLAN), you can inspect whether your distro is setting IPv6 configuration to “Automatic” on the first connexion attempt (this is true e. g. for Fedora 16 and openSUSE 12.1). If so, and if your DHCP server (e. g. the router) does not offer IPv6 addresses, Network Manager will wait for an IPv6 address after receiving an IPv4 address until a timeout is reached.
To avoid this lag, you can go to Network Settings, choose your interface (LAN/WLAN/…), click Configure, choose the IPv6 Settings tab and change Method from Automatic to Ignore.
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During my latest experiments with LVM and LUKS in diverse combinations, I’ve encountered a very peculiar behaviour: after I’ve setup my MBR partition table and rebooted, the PC hung itself at POST, saying Auto-Detecting AHCI PORT 0, to which my SATA HDD was attached. The only way to pass POST turned out to be either detaching the newly partitioned HDD (port 0) or… switching the motherboard SATA controller to the IDE (compatibility) mode instead of the AHCI mode in the BIOS. Neither of which is satisfactory. How come?
Well, this seems to be a bug in the way the controller (-firmware?) tries to detect the partitioning scheme of the HDD (which is needed for booting) and is most often easily resolved by resizing the first partition on the hard drive by a few MBs. This bug seems to be relatively widespread, but its actual causes remain a mystery to me. If anyone can shed some light on the machinery behind this, please comment.
I’ve recently installed openSUSE 12.1 x86_64 with KDE4 on my desktop PC, using LVM on an encrypted (LUKS) partition set. I’m quite content with it (and really recommend relying on some good full disk encryption — by now, it is fully transparent to the user). Here is a summary of little tips I’ve gathered since.
I’ve decided to change my life. Substantially. I’ve decided to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout.
No, if you’re thinking about black and white keys now, you’re quite wrong there. I don’t mean Antonín Dvořák [ˈdvor̝aːk], I mean August Dvorak [ˈdvɔræk].
I’ve been a QWERTY touch typist for quite a few years now. My “default” layout used to be the US QWERTY with Polish characters accessible via AltGr. I’ve also been using the German QWERTZ with a dedicated ä, ö, ü and ß key quite heavily for regular text, but couldn’t get used to it as a coder or text terminal user. Continue reading »
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Welcome to my new blog — a blog about free and open source software, libre technology, practical skills and hopefully plenty more…
Have fun!
trsk