The Thinkpad Timeline

At this point in my life, though I’m not anywhere near what some would consider “mid-life crisis” territory, I wish to go back and look at all my gadgets that I learned from over the years. Why am I posting this in the blog? Why, because I can, of course! …and I have no updates as of yet, on anything I’ve been working on.

I received a concussion over my final spring break and I’m kind of nursing my skull and upper spine back to health, so many things have taken a pause.

Some, such as the Sony VAIO UX series, were too expensive for me growing up. Those had to wait until I was past my 20s and either in college or employed. One product line has never given up on me though! Thinkpads!

My first Thinkpad I recall using for an extended period was the X61 Tablet that I used back in highschool with the notoriously awful Windows Vista OS. This was one of those devices that only had one input mechanism at the time, a Trackpoint. I loved it! That was back when Linux seemed to still need “training wheels” for all newcomers, much different than today in 2019, and our high school was a Microsoft shop. I learned quite a bit about fixing hardware when working on our school’s help desk at the time- Thinkpads are very modular! I had this X61 Tablet for about four years and still have it sitting around somewhere!

My second and third Thinkpads were around the same timeframe, about three/four years ago or so. The T420 I got for free from a prior employer and the E430 I grabbed used from a friend both suited their tasks very well: being media consumption/researching devices. In 2018 both had been given new homes. The T420 went to a friend and the E430 went to then-computer-less best friends when they moved out on their own. Glad I get to share these tanks with those more deserving!

My fourth Thinkpad I received in 2017 or so and had used it as a daily driver from then until the beginning of this year, 2019. This boi was the t440s. Though outdated at the time, as were the others after the X61T, it was my first venture with Linux on a daily driver laptop. After trying Xubuntu, Solus and MX Linux, I settled on Solus due to the freshness of their Budgie flagship experience and the great app store organization. Last year, when I worked for Tesla, I used it when running around the factory the first handful of days before a Macbook Pro was procured for me. At the time, only Ubuntu or Fedora computers (regarding Linux) were allowed on the network and no Arch or Solus machines would make it very far for working. I retired the T440s this year and, after flashing the original Windows 7 disk, gave it to a family friend who was in need. I believe he has it running Windows 10 now :(

My travel gaming PC these days is an Aero15Xv8 running Pop!_OS until I find time to properly configure an Arch setup on it, as it is more than capable. My daily driver that I use for school, development, research, media consumption and overall tinkering is the Thinkpad A485. I have Manjaro running on it currently I likely won’t be upgrading to any other recent Thinkpad until we start seeing more Ryzen options in the X line of devices. Ever since having the X61 Tablet, I’ve always wanted to go back to that ultraportable line…perhaps the day will come when USB4 and Ryzen PRO APUs combine in 2020 or 2021. I will say, the Redditor who I received this A485 from was kind enough to grab the upgraded IPS screen and an OPAL NVMe M.2 drive when he configured it for his business.

I look forward to a Thinkpad and hopefully Purism filled future! The trackpoint addiction is too hardcore currently, however.

Updates + Thinkpad acquired

Just some quick updates. Outside of insane amounts of classwork, not much has happened project-wise in the last two weeks or so.
Although I won’t be back near my home until tomorrow morning, a used Thinkpad A485 arrived there. I’ll be looking into future possibilities of getting coreboot flashed on it, but for now I’ll likely just run Manjaro on it with the stock bootloader. Manjaro has been my go-to on most of my devices, save the picky Aero, since 2019 started. This Thinkpad will be the fifth Thinkpad I’ve ever owned in my life- in the past I’ve had an X61 Tablet, T420, E430 and T440s in that order, starting in 2008. Thinkpads are a lot more flexible regarding what operating systems they can run, versus most competitors’ laptops these days.

I have been reading more and more into libre computing recently and prefer user-modifiable everything on a system to closed-down systems. If Purism ever moves to AMD or RISC-V in the future, I will gladly give their laptop/future tablet listings more of a look. For now, I'm most interested in the $150 PinePhone offering from Pine64 and especially the hubbub around the Librem 5 from Purism. I will likely migrate to the Librem 5 from my Pixel 2 XL in the future as I am sick and bored of the same old same old from Google and Apple…as well as the information they gather from me without my consent.

My Notes on the Aero15X

Hello again. Little update here on my personal laptop, the Gigabyte Aero15x. I’ll probably go with an all-AMD laptop in the future or a laptop with no GPU, seeing that the support both from NVIDIA and the Linux community is lacking a tad for laptops with this specific NVIIDIA Optimus setup using a GTX1070.

I have added my notes on what has and hasn’t worked thus far under the project page Linux on the Aero15X if anyone is interested. I’ll update it once I install the original Linux distro I was using on the laptop, though I’m a much bigger fan of the more-complete-feeling Manjaro distro. I’ll have blog posts detailing future projects coming up, once there’s more to report!

Reviving The Old Dell Mini 10 + Update!

Back in early 2009, there was a tiny little “cheap” netbook, designed by Dell, to be utilized for simple web browsing and office applications. The hardware was incredibly cheap, however it could easily withstand being knocked around in an elementary or high school student’s bookbag. This was the Dell Mini 10.

Seeing that I haven’t really done much with the restoration of this old hardware, I feel that it isn’t worth its own project page. Instead, I will document it here in a blog post.

The above picture was what you would originally find this netbook listed as on Dell’s website back in the day.

After upgrading the RAM to the maximum it could utilize, 2GB, installing a little SSD I had laying around and throwing Linux Mint 32-bit on it, we now have a cheap little Chromebook replacement. My goal in the future is to use a Pinebook Pro instead of this little guy or my x360 HP chromebook. I intend on giving away the Dell Mini 10 and the HP Chromebook to others who have more use for them, but for now, this chromecasts fine to the TV.

Now, above, we have the output of an application called “Neofetch” that, in my opinion, should come standard with most Linux Distributions. If interested in doing the same as I have done, feel free to reach out to the Linux Reddit, as they’re very helpful to newcomers looking to recycle some old hardware.

As we can see here, I have installed Linux Mint on this. It is a very lightweight operating system, and much more secure than the aging Windows 7 Starter that was installed on here.

Microsoft is abandoning Windows 7 if I recall correctly, and Linux allows users to own their hardware without relying on needless Microsoft spyware. The goal of this was to outfit the little netbook with a barebones operating system that auto-launched Chrome whenever you started it up. As we can see under the “Memory” section of the output, this OS uses VERY LITTLE memory at idle. Even when casting informative Youtube videos to the TV, it still only gets up to about 1gb.

That’s the news regarding the Dell Mini 10 that I revived, however I’d also like to add that I’ll be working on some Terraform code going forward for a senior design project!

unRAIDing It Up

This picture is a great representation of how I’ve learned to use LXC/LXD containers. Also, many preconfigured apps, I’ve learned, can be easily installed on unRAID. Again, I’m doing this as a personal project, so I’m quite lazy when it comes to configuring things.

So far, Plex and a PXE test VM are running under unRAID, with other operating systems being test-installed on it as I move onward. The default snap of Nextcloud that gets installed with a stock Ubuntu Server 18.04.01 release doesn’t seem to work as well as Nextcloud in a docker container for unRAID. Learning more about this as I go on, but also working with my group to get our Senior Design project up and running on this as well.

DDNS is a great service…