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My New EEE 1000 HE

2009-03-15 Tags: , ,

I'm typing this on an Asus EEE 1000 HE laptop. You've probably read a lot of good things on it and I have to say that it's definitely a very nice little laptop.

Since last October, I was using an MSI Wind U100 and before that I was on a Thinkpad X61. I love little laptops with big batteries. I'm now typing with the computer on lap, very reclined sideway on my couch. That's not the best position to code or to work on a graphical design but somehow I really like it for writing prose, that is, blogging and answering emails. When the summer will be back, I look forward to type using the very same position but in my hammock this time. You can't do that if your computer is heavy or if you need to carry a power cord around.

I don't work much on the road. It happens that I put my laptop in my backpack and that I hit the road with my motorcycle. When it happens I end up working from a café in a remote town or from the side of a lake in a provincial park but that is far from my typical usage. Nope, nothing that fancy. I'm just a lazy bum with a hammock.

Getting sound to work on a Thinkpad R60e

2008-04-15 Tags: ,

At job, we have a huge stack of laptops. Those are mostly used for training but when we go out for consulting, we get to pick from the stack. Since we let student rip the OS to shreds, the stack is always freshly installed with a recent GNU/Linux distribution. There is lot of hardware diversity in the stack; last time I went for a Thinkpad R60e, and sound didn't work.

Since I'm out for a few weeks, no sound would be a major hit on my moral. Here is how I got the sound to work on Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10). There might be an easier way to do it but the following worked.

First, a word on the problem. The sound card is an Intel ICH7. 

   $ lspci | grep Audio
   00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)

With the default install, kmix will see all the channels but nothing will play. Some applications, like Amarok, will report that the device is busy, others like ogg123 will work perfectly fine with the progress bar and everything except that you will hear no sound.