More photos of Thinkpad T30

More photos of Thinkpad T30

more photos of Thinkpad T30

Photos of Thinkpad T30

I have been using the laptop with an external monitor and installed xcircuit, R, Emacs, ESS and a GNU Go game on the Debian OS. I also surfed a bit this morning in Debian but mostly this was window shopping surfing. I am writing my blogs and doing school work surfing this morning using my eMac. I could sell my thinkpad back to IBM. I am also thinking that using it with the external monitor would be ok and that it might be worth it to keep and even upgrade the RAM by 256MB for 50$. I read about the first half hour of Learning Emacs in 24 hours.

My laptop is still in the shop and so far they haven't been able to fix it. I am hopeful but it may be a lost cause. I was able today to fax using my Mac. So that functionality is ok on the Mac. So I may not need a windows computer for that.

I was able to get my PSP updated to system 2.0. I can now wirelessly surf the internet on my play station portable. I learned a little of how to use it and bookmarked my personal home page and my wife's poetry page. I will now test playing Apple iTunes files on it.

The WinNT would not see the zip drive and also the WinNT would not work with the IBM download for drivers. So I tried Fedora Core and it did both. It downloaded the drivers and also saw and worked with the USB zip drive. So I downloaded only the ethernet driver. I then copied it to the Win2K machine and installed this driver. I was able then to connect the Win2K to the Internet and updated windows first. I then use an automatic drivers update software at IBM and got all the drivers installed and even updated the bios on the laptop. I also completed copying the old My Documents folder to the Win2K.

I am taking the laptop to the school's repair shop to have it looked at tomorrow or today. I also need to install Debian again.

I installed Windows 2000 successfully on my new laptop hard drive. My Windows XP CD is no good. I will now reinstall Debian. I need to download about 20 drivers or more from IBM for Windows 2000 to work properly on the IBM Thinkpad. I can not download the drivers on the Macintosh, so I am going to boot up my server running Windows NT and see if I can download them to a zip disk. Then I will transfer them to the Thinkpad. This will also test the server running Windows NT and its USB connection because I am using a USB zip drive. I have never tried to get anything to work in the server's USB connections. I am at the moment copying the old My Documents folder from Windows XP to Windows 2000 using my USB hard drive on the Thinkpad.

I emailed the school's hardware repairs services and asked if they could fix the laptop's screen. They charge 35$ per hour. The new screen may cost a lot.

I got the X windows working on the T30 but have some problems still with the mouse. I used dpkg-reconfigure. I used information at this page on the web to learn about the xf86Config-4 file. http://ozlabs.org/~jk/docs/T30+linux/

I am reading about SGML, IP law, and e-business this morning.

Recovery of the laptop!

It is only the screen that was broken on the laptop. But this is a key part. On Monday I will call IBM and see if they can fix it. I was able to connect the laptop to an external monitor and access everything and keep it working. I took the entire My Documents folder off using a USB hard drive of 20GB size. I am able to access all the word processing documents on the Macintosh computer. These are most of my key school documents. The only other documents that might be windows only are SAS program files. I may not need these too dearly this year as I may not study much in the way of statistics this year. I also took the email off the laptop be exporting it to Netscape and then copying this folder full of email to the Mac mail program. In the end I had just bought a new 60GB hard drive for the IBM laptop and installed it and tried to put on the operating systems WinXP and Debian. Both failed at this point. With the Debian though it is just a matter of getting X windows working.

My laptop is broken

My laptop got knocked off the coffee table and is now unusable. Thus this linux plan is on hold now. I will have to use my Macintosh computer now. This accident will test my back up process. I did not yet make an end of July back up so I will be using my end of June back up CD. I did make a back up CD of email at the end of July. Now I need to decide what I will do for a laptop. Perhaps the used iBook will be my laptop. Perhaps I will buy another IBM laptop. For now I am using my eMac computer.

I got some help from our local Linux novice email list. Farrah Rashid sugested he had simply divided his drive into two patitions. In the first he had installed WinXP then simply rebooted and installed Debian from CD in the second partition with a swap patition of 1 GB. I would use a swap partition of 512 MB but I think I may upgrade the RAM at some point so a 1 GB partition should be good.

With this method I am wondering about the Grub or Boot Magic. In other words how do you handle the dual boot up?

The new hard drive was shipped from Vancouver yesterday. In terms of initial format and and partitioning, I know I am limited in the number of partitions I can make. I was thinking of making one boot partition and then two reasonably similar 30GB sized partitions for each of the two operating systems. The web page I meantioned below suggested that Grub will not work well with WinXP. This author suggested using Boot Magic in its own Win FAT partition of a fair size that both operating systems could view and access. Boot Magic comes free with Partition Magic. So this is perhaps undecided at present.

Researching the install of Fedora and WinXP

I found this page at a Linux on Thinkpads ring site http://www.phys.cwru.edu/~covault/linux_fedora_core3_x23.html I read most of the page. I would have to buy partition magic for this method and this guy kept his original WinXP because he did not want to buy XP. So two differences in my senario. I have a copy of WinXP from school that my tuition has paid for and two I am installing on a new hard drive. But I also learned from this web page that Fedora core is an easy OS to install on a Thinkpad in terms of drivers for the various Thinkpad parts.

I sold my old Duron chip and mother board and RAM. I got 18$ for these. Just two years ago the RAM cost close to 100$ and three years ago the motherboard and chip were about 300$. I got about one full year of use of these parts. The computer these were from was my 16th personal computer. It did not last long. It was frustrating later on in its life. I am left with the case, hard drive and floppy drive now. I can now buy it a new motherboard and chip and RAM, if I have time and money to do this.

Major project: install WinXP and Debian Linux on my IBM Thinkpad T30 laptop

My next major Linux install will be to get this Thinkpad T30 working as a dual boot machine. I will download and install Debian as well as WinXP on this laptop. I still need to research the Debian step. I also need to do back up with the 20GB USB drive but the My Documents folder on my Thinkpad is only some 6 GB in size so this USB 20GB drive will do this no problem. I must remember to do a Win Fat format on this USB drive with my eMac computer.

I am buying a 60GB hard drive, a 20 GB USB drive and a 16 channel mixing board.

I did a fair amount of shopping today. I won on ebay a 20GB USB hard drive for a fair price. I also put a down payment on a Behringer 16 channel mixing board. I also must now pay for a 60GB hard drive for my IBM laptop and from this same ebay seller I bought an iLife DVD. It is difficult to manage all this spending and money. The mixer will possible make money for me. I was able to make 40$ this past month with our PA system. I will have spent about 550$ on this PA by the end of the summer. But my original PA system has paid for itself. It originally cost about 1600$. I have earned this much with it from about 1993 to 1999.

I won on ebay.ca a 60GB hard drive I can use in my Thinkpad for the dual boot install. I have my school provided copy of WinXP. I will install either Fedora or Debian as the Linux OS. I will need to do some more research into installing Linux on the Thinkpad T30. I also won a copy of iLife 04. I am still bidding on a 512 MB RAM chip and another 60GB hard drive for the iBook with the same seller. This will cost approximately 350$ in total.

My computers are all running fine now except for a few of the Thinkpad project machines. My main Thinkpad is fine. My new used iBook should arrive via UPS this week. In about a week I will purchase a 60GB hard drive for the iBook with Panther installed on the hard drive by the seller of the drive. I will also buy from this same ebay seller a 512MB RAM chip for ths iBook. So in about three weeks just on time for school I should have two well functioning laptops. My old IBM PC server is presently up and running Red Hat Fedora in my office. This post is being written on my Thinkpad T30 in the living room.

I am just doing my back up process now. I am printing my blogs in hard copy. I will save my outlook store folder on a CD. The outlook store folder is soon going to be too big for a CD. I will probably be able to delete some email from this folder though. I will also back up the my documents folder and my school work folder to CD.

I installed Fedora core 3 on my friend's HP pentium III 500 MHz computer. It really had no problems except for some error messages perhaps because we were using a 65 GB hard drive.

I did not do my back ups yet. Instead I helped a friend by installing Fedora Core 3 on his computer. It took me about 4 hours to update the software.