Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Lenovo offers SuSE ThinkPad T60p? Lenovo debuts Linux ThinkPads. (InfoWorld) - "Lenovo Group announced on Tuesday the availability of the ThinkPad T60p, its first laptop computer preloaded with the Linux operating system... The new laptop is primarily aimed at engineers, the company said... Linux users will welcome Lenovo's decision to preload the open-source operating system on its new ThinkPad." Well, the left hand forgot to tell the right hand. The links on the Lenovo site lead to http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/notebooks/thinkpad/t-series/workstation.html?re=home_Innov_us where it says, "The ThinkPad T60p Mobile Workstation does not come preloaded with SUSE Linux. Users must obtain SUSE Linux licenses from Novell. The ThinkPad T60p comes with DOS entitlement only and ships with a blank hard disk drive. SUSE Linux OS will be supported by Novell, while Lenovo will support Hardware," Hopefully, they will get the story together over the next couple of days. The whole point of buying such a machine is to get a pre-installed image that supports all the oddball features of Bluetooth, hibernate, ACPI, power management, the funky specialized buttons, the pointer, the touchpad and so forth. If you have to go out and buy and install SuSE yourself, what's the point? Buy the T60p with Windows, snapshot the image, shrink the partition and set up the machine to dual-boot. 2:40:58 PM    comment []

Dell recalls 4 million laptop batteries Major news networks are carrying the story this morning, but in case you missed it, Jeremy Reimer of Ars Technica reports Dell recalls four million laptop batteries. "Dell has announced that it is issuing a worldwide recall of over four million batteries in laptops that the company sold between 2004 and 2006. If you have such a laptop, get your replacement battery now!" 10:31:18 AM    comment []

Why is there so much buggy software? Ed Foster asks, "Why is there so much buggy software?" Too many keyboards, I suspect. 9:30:35 AM    comment []

Trouble starting XAMPP's Apache on Windows In attempting to set up XAMPP on a Windows XP Pro workstation, I couldn't get Apache to start. Attempting a command-line start gave me an error message that port 80 was in use. The netstat command showed nothing listening on that port. As a work-around, I edited the config file for Apache to work on http port 8888 and https port 8443 and confirmed that Apache was installed correctly and working fine. Finally, digging around in the Services applet showed that the IISAdmin was running. Dredging around on Google yielded this blog entry that recommends disabling the service and rebooting to detect which app is launching IISAdmin. That cured the problem; Apache's up and running. XAMPP rocks. 9:29:00 AM    comment []

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