When I first got a digital SLR camera a few years ago, I spent some time evaluating photo printing options. I sent a set of test prints to several different companies, and wound up deciding to use Shutterfly for my photo printing.

It's been some time since then, so I figured it was about time to re-evaluate options.

There are three main things to consider when obtaining prints of photos: cost of prints, quality of prints at delivery, and longevity of prints. Many people look only at cost, and those that look past cost rarely look past quality at longevity. Longevity (or permanence) is, in my opinion, the most important factor to consider. But let's look at all of them.

Longevity

All color photo print technologies fade or otherwise degrade over time. There are several main things that can cause this: exposure to light, exposure to gases (especially ozone), and exposure to humidity. The impact of these different items varies by print technology, paper, and process.

Longevity: Traditional Photo Paper

Most services such as Shutterfly, Snapfish, Ofoto, as well as retailers such as Walmart, Target, and Walgreens print on traditional photo paper.

Historically, traditional photo paper has had terrible fading characteristics. Typically, old photos exposed to light -- for instance, hanging on a wall underneath a light bulb or in the sun -- will exhibit severe fade towards yellow or magenta. Modern papers are much better, but you will still not want to leave them directly in the sun or under lights.

Over at TPR, you can find several papers analyzing this. Perhaps the most interesting are test of digital prints and image permanence: comparing the technologies.

To attempt to summarize, what you see is that of the two common consumer-grade photo papers, Kodak Royal and Fuji Crystal Archive, the Fuji paper has better permanence. However, the pro-quality Kodak Professional Supra Endura is better than either of them by a significant margin. The photo papers didn't really have a problem with humidity, and not much of a problem with ozone.

Longevity: Inkjet

So what about inkjets and laser processes? The main thing I learned from my research is that there is a tremendous amount of variance here. When looking solely at top-quality inkjet papers and inks, they ranged everywhere from having little bits of them flake off after a few months to doing better than any of the photo papers. This variance occurred even with similar papers from the same manufacturer.

As far as light exposure is concerned, every inkjet paper tested by TPR did better than Kodak Royal. Some fared about the same as Fuji Crystal Archive. And some even beat out Kodak Supra Endura.

But look at the ozone exposure test and you see a far different picture. All of the photo papers did really well, though suprisingly Supra Endura was the worst of them (though the scale is so small here that the difference is pretty minimal).

Not one of the inkjet papers came even close to that, and some faded so fast that they couldn't even make it halfway through the test.

As far as humidity is concerned, it barely impacted the photo paper prints at all. Inkjet impacts were still mostly small, but also were mostly more impacted than the photo paper.

Longevity: Laser

And finally, how about laser prints. There was huge variety here. An HP printer they tested faded so fast it couldn't complete the light exposure test, while a Konica-Minolta fared better than Kodak Supra Endura in one test. In another light exposure test, they performed about the same as the photo papers. Ozone had little effect on the laser papers, except for the Dell test, which faded so fast they had to abort the test early. Humidity also had little effect on the laser prints.

Longevity: Other Examples

Brett Wilson did some interesting experiments with photos hung in front of a window as well. Wilhelm Imaging also has done some research in this area, though they are done using fluorescent lights only, which is prejudicial in favor of inkjet papers and against photo papers.

For the ultimate in longevity, true black and white photo paper is well-regarded.

TPR also has a report covering different lacquer and other finishes often applied to prints to improve their longevity.

Longevity: Conclusions

With the exact right combination of inkjet paper and ink, you can get a print that will last exceptionally long. Some inkjet paper and ink combinations have really poor longevity characteristics, however, as do the laser papers.

Photo papers, especially Kodak Supra Endura, but even Fuji Crystal Archive, will last quite awhile as well, and are probably the best storage if kept in dark conditions such as an album.

Print Quality

When looking at print quality, I'm concerned with correct color balance, saturation, cropping, consistency, sharpness, contract, and detail in both dark and light areas -- the typical things you'd look for.

Printing inkjet prints at home leaves all this up to your printer, inks, papers, and you, so we can't really compare meaningfully.

Back when I looked at it, Shutterfly and Ofoto did the best. Walmart, Walgreens, dotPhoto, and many of the other online sites were really too poor to even bother with. Ofoto had a bit of a yellow tint to it, while Shutterfly did pretty well.

Most of the reviews of the major sites I've seen lately rank Shutterfly or Snapfish at the top in terms of quality. Many also rank Ofoto/Kodak near the top.

Walmart and Walgreens produce consistently bad results, and I only use them if all that matters is speed. If you ever read a review where somebody says that they get good results from one of those places, find a review where somebody has a better idea what they're talking about.

Besides your mass-market sites like Shutterfly and Ofoto, there are also some slightly more expensive sites. The two best-known are mpix.com and adorama.com. Mpix is a division of Miller's Professional Imaging, a pro lab. Mpix is basically a website where you can submit photos in the way you would to one of these other sites, and they can do their thing. Their standard rate includes human color correction on every print, but they offer a cheaper rate if you don't need that. Their standard paper is Kodak Pro Supra Endura (the one that ranked highest in longevity tests), and the options go up from there. They also offer printing on true black and white paper, as well as wrap-around canvas and other such options.

I've sent some work their way and have been exceptionally happy with the result. Everything from the color of the prints down to the packaging shows extreme care and attention to detail. Among the reviews that cover mpix -- many don't -- it almost always comes out at the top of the pack, easily beating out Shutterfly and Snapfish. It can be more pricy (though sometimes actually cheaper, since shipping is flat-rate with them), though not significantly.

Adorama is also sometimes mentioned. Most people seem to prefer mpix over adorama, but some prefer adorama. It's a bit cheaper when you don't need color correction for some prints, but sometimes -- right now, for instance -- closes for weeks at a time to observe Jewish holidays. It didn't seem to be enough for me to bother.

Cost

Perhaps the easiest to figure out is cost, since websites typically list it right there for you.

High-quality inkjet prints are by far the most expensive option. I looked at 4x6 prints. Using the high-quality paper/ink combinations that did well in the TPR tests, and when buying supplies in bulk to get the best possible discount, it's still 25 cents or more for a single 4x6 print. That's with doing all the color work yourself, and not even figuring in the cost of the inevitable experimenting with getting the software set up right and the wasted prints when ink gets low. It also doesn't figure in the cost of the printer.

At mpix, if you do your own color correction, it's 19 cents per print, plus shipping. Prints are on Kodak Professional Supra Endura Shipping is a flat rate of $3 for 50 or fewer 4x6 or smaller prints, or a flat rate of $5.95 for USPS Priority Mail for anything else. They offer FedEx at an additional cost, which maxes out at a flat rate of $12.75 for overnight shipping. Some items such as framed canvas prints are more expensive.

Other options at an additional cost include color correction by a human, metallic paper, Ilford B&W paper, etc. There are also some more typical pro-lab options: red-eye removal by a human, custom retouching, etc.

At Shutterfly, a 4x6 print goes for 15 cents. You can get them as low as 10 cents if you buy a pre-paid plan of 600 prints for $60. Shipping varies based on the number of prints, starting at $1.79 for up to 10 prints, ranging up to $21 for 500 prints, with 3 cents per print after that. Priority and express mail is available at an additional charge. Shutterfly's standard paper is Fuji Crystal Archive.

At Snapfish, a 4x6 print goes for 9 cents. You can get them as low as 8 cents if you buy a pre-paid plan of 250 prints. Shipping at Snapfish follows a complicated formula, but is generally approximately the same as Shutterfly. Though if you print more than 595 prints, watch out for the 10 cents per print overage fee. They don't state what paper they use. Recent reports seem to suggest that it's Fuji Crystal Archive, but some reports claim it's Kodak Royal.

My Conclusions

I'm planning to switch most of my prints to mpix -- their higher quality and cheaper shipping offset their higher per-print cost for me. Also, I plan to try out Snapfish and see what sort of quality I get from them for things where quality isn't really that critical.

Can't find any documentation about this on the web, and it's a PITA, so here goes. Note: No pictures. I was too scared to take time out to take pictures. Disassembly is not hard at first. Three screws hidden over the battery pack allow removing the cover over the power button and wireless switch, which then frees 4 tabs that lock the top of the keyboard down. My keyboard was also taped down with double-sided tape, and glued down. This is the part I hate, both because I still haven't accepted that the common way to put together consumer electorinics is tape and glue, and because it's never possible to get it apart undamaged. I pried the keyboard up from the top, pushing under to untape/glue, and taking care of the cable. There was also a flap of plastic stuck down over the cable, which had to be peeled away. Many clips on the bottom of the keyboard hold it in place and have to be slipped out. I ended up slightly bending the arrow keys of the keyboard in yanking it out, though I think they'd still be ok-ish. Luckily I was putting in a new one. Removing the keyboard cable was strange. Its socket is not the typical kind you can life to unlock. The socket is one piece and does not move at all. I eventually just pulled the cable out of it. This is where I started to get very nervous. Replacing the cable was a PITA. You have to bend its end at a 90 degree angle, and then just line it up and press it down into the socket. Hard. And rub along it and do whatever you can to get enough force exerted down the thin cable strip to make it slip far enough into the socket to work. I booted up the laptop several times while doing this, to test if I had managed to get it working. Eventually I had. Then I very carefully reseated the keyboard, and replaced the cover and screws. Unfortunatly, the tape and glue was doing something. The new keyboard is very springy in the middle, where that held it down before. So I will have to take it apart again and put on some new double-sided tape or something eventually. Conclusions:

• Fujitsu sucks for not springing for an extra 0.01 cents for a locking cable socket.
• Laptop manufacturers in general suck for using tape and glue. (Or for building weaghty mehemoths that use better fastening systems.)
• When it's been disassembled, a lot of the magic of a laptop seeps out for me and never really comes back. Maybe next time I should not do my own repairs, just to preserve that heady comsumer magic of not knowing what's inside?
• I'm still using Caps Lock for Esc, so why did I even bother?!
• New keyboards feel strange.

So my Esc key broke today. Maybe due to high humidity last night -- the laptop was generating a lot of spurious lid open events earlier. New keyboard ordered, etc, nothing too unusual given the crummy nature of laptop keyboards (Fujitsu's in specific). The interesting thing though, is that even though I've remapped Caps Lock to generate Escape for now, this threw my typing off to an amazing extent. I don't just have trouble typing ^]:wq in vim. I have trouble typing arbitrary sentences in programs that don't use escape at all. Why? I don't touch type the way people are taught to in school, with fingers on the home keys. I touch type the way you learn to by typing a lot, ad-hoc, until your hands learn exactly how to type the common things you throw at them. This includes being able to type ^]:wq as fast as I can type "joey". My home keys are, approximatly:

Tab Q S X Space       Down . ; ' Enter

(Space and Down are covered by my thumbs.) This might seem a bit weird, but as a programmer, I hit tab a lot, and, enter lots of semicolons, periods, and quotes. As a human on the WWW, I scroll down a lot. As a command-line user, Enter is a key I hit a lot. That's my guesses why my fingers go there. This wasn't planned, it evolved. In fact, I have other home key locations, that are used for other activities too. Now that I'm typing in a lot of text here, my WPM has increased a lot, because my hands have moved closer to the center of the keyboard. Something like this.

      W E F V    J I O  

Although every time I've checked, it's been a slightly different set of keys. My hands know where they are, and seem to make pretty good guesses about where I'll want them in the next word and pick a different "home row", depending. Also, if I'm scrolling around a lot, my left hand switches to:

                      Left Up Right

Point being that this is all very dynamic, and unconcious, and very adapted to this exact keyboard. Learning a new keyboard will take me days of fumbling, that are reminiscent of someone describing switching from QWERTY to DVORAK. And, it turns out that even moving a single key like Esc is close to switching to an entire new keyboard. Needing to reach down to Caps Lock for Esc threw everything else off subtly, even when I wasn't typing that key. Clearly this is not the best way to type. It's just my way. :-/

My Fujitsu-Siemens laptop’s power adapter became unreliable. I contacted support, described the symptoms. A week later, I had a new adapter. Thank you, Fujitsu-Siemens. You rock.

As you might know from reading my blog, at my workplace, we have largely standardized on Linux on the desktop and laptop.

We use systemimager to maintain a standard desktop image and a separate standard laptop image. These images differ because there are different assumptions. The desktop machines mount /home over NFS, authenticate to LDAP, etc. This doesn't work on laptops. Moreover, desktops don't use network-manager or wifi, but laptops do.

Our desktop image uses Debian's hardware autodetection -- plus a little hacking in /etc/init.d/gdm -- to automatically adjust to a wide range of hardware. So far this has worked well.

Laptops are much more picky. Our standard laptop model had been the HP nc4400 -- a small and light 12" model that people here loved. HP discontinued that model. Their replacement was the 2510p. We ordered one in here for evaluation. Try as we might, we couldn't get it to suspend and resume properly in Linux.

So I went out scouring the field of Linux laptops. Companies such as Emperor Linux buy retail laptops from people like Lenovo, test them for Linux, and sell them -- at a premium. These were too expensive to justify at the quantities we need them.

Then I stumbled across Linux Certified. I'd never heard of them before. I called them up and asked a few questions. They don't buy retail laptops, but instead have OEMs in Taiwan build laptops to their spec. They happen to use the same OEM that Fujitsu does, I believe. (No big company builds laptops in the USA these days). I asked them about wifi chipsets, video chipsets, whether they use stock kernels. I got clueful answers to all of these.

So we ordered one of their LC2100s models. They didn't offer Debian preinstalled, but did offer Ubuntu, so I selected that. The laptop arrived a couple of days (!!) later, configured with the particular CPU, etc. that I selected.

I was surprised at the thrill I felt at taking a brand new laptop out of its box, turning it on, and watching Grub appear before my eyes. Ubuntu proceeded to boot. I then of course installed our regular Debian image on the thing to check it out.

It needed a kernel and xserver-xorg-video-intel from lenny, as well as the ipw3945 driver for wifi, but otherwise worked with the exact same software as our HP nc4400 image. (In fact, it wasn't hard to support both laptops with that image, since both use a lot of Intel hardware.) The one trick was making hibernate call /etc/init.d/ipw3945d stop so that the ipw3945 module could be unloaded before suspend. (Why this particular chipset needs a daemon is beyond me, but oh well.)

The hardware is great. As far as I know, the ipw3945 was the only component that wasn't directly and automatically supported by DFSG-free software in lenny main. The screen is sharp and high-contrast (it's glossy, which I personally don't like, but I bet our users will). The device itself feels sturdy. It's small and dense. I haven't opened it up, but it looks like all you need is a screwdriver to do so.

The only downside is that they don't sell docking stations for it. Their standard answer on that is to buy a USB docking station. That's a partial answer, but can't handle power or video like a standard docking station will.

Also, the LC2100s is much cheaper than the HP laptop, even when configured when nicer specs in every way. That is no doubt partially due to the lack of the Windows tax.

I'm sending off an order for 4 more today, I believe.

Yesterday I bought a laptop for a friend, who also asked me to install Linux on it. Since she's not computer-savvy at all, I opted for an Ubuntu. I provide here a short description of the hardware and what to expect regarding compatibility for anyone about to buy one of these. Hardware description

Model	HP 530
Part No.	GU322AA
CPU	Intel(R) Core(TM) Duo CPU T2300 @ 1.66GHz (stepping 12) - 2 MiB cache
CPU flags	fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx constant_tsc pni monitor est tm2 xtpr
Screen	330 mm x 250 mm viewable area, "glossy" wide-screen. 1280x800 pixels.
Video	Intel Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller
Audio	Intel 82801G (ICH7 Family) HDA
USB	Intel 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller
Ethernet	Intel 82562ET/EZ/GT/GZ - PRO/100 VE (LOM) Ethernet Controller Mobile
WiFi	Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection
Optical media	Optiarc DVD RW AD-7560A
Hard disk	Fujitsu MHY2120BH, 112GiB, max UDMA/100

Problems The only problems I had with the hardware were related to the sound card and the lid. The sound card had exactly the same problem as my Dell Inspiron 6400: it won't turn off the internal speakers when you plug something in the audio output jack. This is easily solved adding the following to /etc/modprobe.d/options: options snd-hda-intel enable=yes model=laptop The problem with the lid is that the screen didn't turn off when the lid closed. Just one time it did work, and stopped doing so after a reboot. Looking with acpi_listen, it seems that the acpi event isn't even generated. I don't know if this is a hardware or software problem. Also, some not very nice things should be noted about it: it has no independent media buttons for volume, suspend, etc.; only the WiFi transmitter kill and the power button, the rest needed a key chord. It has only two USB ports, which nowadays is incredibly few. No LEDs for hard dist, scroll lock or num lock. The audio jacks are on the front, which makes them very unsuitable for any straight plug. Although seldom used, it is nice to have the ability to turn the screen 180 , but this one can't do it. Finally, the battery is tiny: only four cells amounting 2 Ah of capacity. The power consumption seems a little better than my Dell: running on batteries, with low brightness, an idle GNOME desktop gave a reading of 820mA. Watching a movie from optical media in full screen ranged from 1 A to 1.3 A depending on the spinning of the media and the codec. Burning a DVD at 2x took 1.15 A The good After installing a Ubuntu 7.10, almost everything Just Worked . Of course it warned me about the non-free ipw3945 driver, but in seconds network-manager had connected to my home WLAN. Network manager could be a little more smart and turn off the WiFi transmitter when it's disabled by the user, but I guess that's not only an Ubuntu problem :). Most media keys worked out of the box, the WiFi kill switch worked OK, as did suspend to ram and to disk. Video acceleration and obligatory eye candy worked automatically. No problems either with burning a DVD, listening to music, watching a movie or connecting to my home network. The external aspect is not bad, the screen looks good, and the touch pad is very nice: just a matrix of dots over a surface that doesn't show any other sign of being an input method. In conclusion, it shows that it is a very cheap machine, but the drawbacks seem very few comparing to the good price. Tags: Planet Lugfi, Planet Debian, Tecnolog a

Short update:

• I had no time to do hacking lately
• there are too many mails on -boot; I wish they changed their minds and made a -boot-dev list, the BTS mails are incredibly annoying (yes, I made a filter, but is not that efficient); I am thinking seriousely about unsubscribing from that list
  
• I would like to retreat from supporting the ppp-udeb package of ppp since I have no more interest in it; I already unsubcribed from part of the mails related to it
• I have a new HDD from my router and is really silent :-) (some good news, at last)
• glest-data contains some unclearly licensed stuff; imagine how nice is that when upstream is unresponsive (although not dead - adds new messages on the upstream forum, but never answers other's posts)
  
• sorry for not having time to work on svn-buildpackage, glest, naughtysvn, wormux and oolite; I would really like NMU work on the debian packages (but I don't know what to say about svn-buildpackage since Eduard Bloch is the lead developer)
• real life is taking is share back
• I am thinking of upgrading to lenny in an attempt to motivate myself back into coding
• aspell-ro with support for the correct diacritics should be uploaded soon in sid; cedilla support is dropped; minor obstructions in the way of the uplaod
  
• LVM rules
• RPM still sucks big time not because of itself, but because of the pure lack of tools for it
• scons can't cross build
• the freetype cross building bug (reported and found in gentoo) has a working patch; they claim they sent the patch
• I got 2 cool presents for my birthday (27 now): an ASUS wl-500g Premium wireless router and a Fujitsu USB HDD
  
• chroot-ing in armel from arm isn't possible (for me?):

ritter:/home/eddy# chroot /data/chroots/armel-root-fs/
Illegal instruction
ritter:/home/eddy# uname -a
Linux ritter 2.6.18-4-ixp4xx #1 Sun Aug 5 19:53:40 EEST 2007 armv5tel GNU/Linux

• I no longer have this on my belly (it washed away):
  

• the vacation was really great
• I have too many interests in and outside of Debian, I'll have to cut back on some of them
• Ross Burton rules because he wrote tasks and he maintains it properly
  

I recently bought a Fujitsu-Siemens LIFEBOOK S-4572 (sub)notebook on eBay for less than 150 Euros, a really great little machine. It's a Pentium III, 750 MHz, 256 MB RAM (the chipset cannot handle more than that unfortunately), 12.1" screen, ethernet, 2x USB 1.1, CD-ROM/DVD reader + CD-ROM writer, PCMCIA, IrDA, modem, and a 15 GB hard drive. No floppy, no serial ports, no parallel port. There's no wireless builtin, but I use a cheapo PCMCIA adapter. The greatest feature compared to all other laptops I previously owned is that the battery life is really great, it lasts almost 3 hours (compare that to 45 minutes on my current "main" laptop). I'm running Debian unstable on the box (of course). Here's the Linux support status as far as I have tested things: Networking Works out of the box using the e100 driver. Sound Works out of the box using the snd_intel8x0 driver. X11 Works out of the box, using either the vesa or the ati driver (at a max. resolution of 1024x768). Touchpad Works out of the box. Using the Option "SHMConfig" "on" line in /etc/X11/xorg.conf's InputDevice section (using the synaptics driver) also works fine and allows you to scroll using the touchpad, e.g. in a browser. More info in the SynapticsTouchpad page on the Debian wiki. CDROM, DVD Reading CD-ROMs and DVDs as well as burning CD-ROMs works fine. I don't think the drive is capable of writing DVDs. External VGA Displaying the screen contents on an external VGA monitor (or beamer) works just fine, switching is done using Fn+F10. PCMCIA Works fine, tested using the Sitecom WL-112 wireless card. The driver installation for that is straight-forward, too:

$ apt-get install rt2500-source
$ m-a a-i rt2500-source
$ dpkg -i /usr/src/rt2500*deb

Special keys All the Fn-keys work fine (brightness, volume, etc.). There are five other special keys (for starting a browser or something) which I haven't tested, but I don't really care... USB Works fine, but it's only USB 1.1, so some higher-speed devices will not work (DVB-T USB devices for example; PCMCIA DVB-T adapters might work). IrDA, Modem Untested, I don't care. Powersaving, Suspend to RAM It seems this CPU (Pentium III, Coppermine) doesn't support frequency scaling, so cpufreq-set doesn't work. I'm using laptop-mode-tools to improve battery life a bit more, though. Also, Suspend-to-RAM works fine out of the box:

$ apt-get install hibernate
$ hibernate-ram

I haven't tested Suspend-to-Disk yet, but I'm not sure it'll work anyway, as I'm using a dm-crypt'ed disk (+ LVM), as with all my boxes. lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation 82440MX Host Bridge [8086:7194] (rev 01)
00:00.1 Multimedia audio controller [0401]: Intel Corporation 82440MX AC'97 Audio Controller [8086:7195]
00:00.2 Modem [0703]: Intel Corporation 82440MX AC'97 Modem Controller [8086:7196]
00:07.0 Bridge [0680]: Intel Corporation 82440MX ISA Bridge [8086:7198] (rev 01)
00:07.1 IDE interface [0101]: Intel Corporation 82440MX EIDE Controller [8086:7199]
00:07.2 USB Controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 82440MX USB Universal Host Controller [8086:719a]
00:07.3 Bridge [0680]: Intel Corporation 82440MX Power Management Controller [8086:719b]
00:12.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Intel Corporation 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] [8086:1229] (rev 09)
00:13.0 CardBus bridge [0607]: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ6933/711E1 CardBus/SmartCardBus Controller [1217:6933] (rev 02)
00:13.1 CardBus bridge [0607]: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ6933/711E1 CardBus/SmartCardBus Controller [1217:6933] (rev 02)
00:14.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: ATI Technologies Inc Rage Mobility P/M [1002:4c52] (rev 64)
01:00.0 Network controller [0280]: RaLink RT2500 802.11g Cardbus/mini-PCI [1814:0201] (rev 01)

Other resources

• Linux on a Fujitsu Siemens S-4572 notebook
• Linux on the Fujitsu-Siemens LifeBook S-4572 Laptop
• LCO's Notebook: Fujitsu-Siemens S Series Lifebook S-4572
• FreeBSD on the Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook S-4572
• Gentoo on Fujitsu Siemens s4572

I'm really considering making this my "main" box even though it's a bit older/slower, as my current laptop with 45 minutes battery life is a major pain when travelling...

There's a photo of me going around the interwebs with a strange caption that misses what was going on. The real story is, after my notebook's power supply died, I tried out this other weird notebook that Google had obtained, apparently from some alternate universe, and was giving away at the conference. It was very nice and small, and had impressive touch-screen data-entry technology (though I kept losing the stylus), and amazing battery power. Seems the data I put it in might stick around for a good hundred years, without any recharging. I was happy to not have to hook a clunky British power adapter up to it. It was also impressively easy to enter arbitrary unicode character such as BOPOMOFO LETTER EH, RUNIC TVIMADUR SYMBOL, and THING I SCRIBBLED DURING BORING PRESENTATION WITH CEDILLA BELOW. Downsides: No wifi or other network (didn't check GSM), very limited storage space (only a few dozen Kibobytes I think), an atrocious text editor that made moving text around way too hard, and had a really bad font, difficulty deleting things (the obvious way to delete something often accidentially removed nearby files as well -- and didn't actually regain any storage space), and very limited encryption (best I could get out it was rot-13). On the network front, there is apparently some "Postal Mail" app that can be used to send mail, but it can take like, weeks, and charges per message. And yeah, no solitare at all, though there was this hangman app. All in all, I was happy to get my Fujitsu back, though I might hold onto this Google notebook thing for emergencies. Won't be porting d-i to it anytime soon though.

This is the reverse lazyweb: I want to share what I learned, since many have similar considerations.

Some time ago I started to use the c't hotline to inform myself before buying computer stuff. Currently I am looking for a new notebook, since my wife poured tea into her old one and the keyboard stopped working.

So today I talked with one of the notebook experts at c't. My criteria were: "small", "long battery lifetime", "reliable", "good warranty", "excellent keyboard" and "works well with Linux".

He recommended that I should look at business notebooks as they came usually in higher quality and with better warranty. He pointed out a downward trend at Lenovo, which seems to produce lower quality machines nower days. Both warranty and technology seem to get reduced in quality. Asus machines break more often then average and their repair/warranty service is bad and improves only slowly. Dell machines break more frequently but their service is good. Linux compatibility seems good at Fujitsu-Siemens notebooks, which seems to have good service/warranty, too. Keyboards have improved a lot over the last few years and he encountered no bad keyboard at any decently priced notebook nower days.

I remember that joeyh and fabbe independently from each other picked a Fujitsu-Siemens. I will look into their offerings now.

I just tried to see if I could order a laptop with Dell without Windows. So I went to the Dell Linux page. Which totally sucked. I'm using flashblock (since flash usually sucks), and the Dell Linux page has huge flash movies on them - the regular Dell site doesn't. Why for heavens sake does Dell use Flash on their Linux page? It's not as if Linux users care about their fancy animations. On contrary, some will probably not have Flash installed, or filtered (like me). And some will be annoyed by not being able to copy and paste the product description from that pointless flash. Even more so: all one flash does is display a table. You know, that has been possible in HTML for like ever, absolutely no reason to use flash here. Oh, and their "large text" button doesn't work either. Nor will screenreaders. Nor does google see the text in the flash. The reason you choose Linux is the reason you not choose Dell. To me this is Dell displaying that they have no clue about Linux admins. I still haven't found, what I'm looking for - a lightweight notebook, with a high resolution display, and good battery life (i.e. no nvidia or ATI graphics, preferrably no built-in CD to save weight and size) - best candidates so far: Fujitsu Siemens P7120 and Samsung X11-T2300 Culesa. Sony Vaio VGN-TX2HP/B is interesting, but I still have some reservations against Sony (they try too hard to do tech lockin, e.g. memory stick; and a friend had bad service experiences, their Rootkit, GPL violations with InstantOn...) and it's a bit too tiny for me. [Update: Thinkpad X series is not an option for me, too low screen resolution and according to the specs low battery life; Apple MacBook isn't an option because of their heat and battery issues, and I don't like the hype around it and any other Apple product]

Well, I finally have a new laptop. Got it yesterday, spent about 3 hours installing and downloading all the software, and then let rsync run all last night to transfer over my home directory. Of course like any good Debian user I've filed a detailed installation report. I'm fairly pleased with the fujitsu p7120 so far. Compared to my old p1100:

• The keyboard feels larger, and the couple of keys that were moved around all make sense, except for delete. The right shift key is enormous, larger than that key is on a regular full size keyboard, and the other non-alphanumerics are also very nicely sized. Even the spacebar is larger than the usual laptop chiclet. I'd not realised how dead my old laptop's keyboard had gotten until keys started falling off; typing on this new one is just fun. Sorry for the length of the resulting blog entry..
• It runs a little bit hotter, but still seems quite nice for a fanless laptop with a fairly modern processor in it (1.2 ghz).
• The screen is much nicer, very bright. Was worried that it would be too reflective, but situations where it is seem rare. It's very nice to be able to see the screen outdoors; I'm writing this in direct sunlight.
• The touch pad is very small, but very responsive. I can't normally use touch pads and I wasn't able to consider buying this laptop until I got a chance to try it out at DebConf. With that said, the lack of a middle mouse button is very annoying, and I'm looking for some way to bind keys in X to a) paste and b) touch pad disable toggle. I'm still having significant problems with reliably dragging to highlight text too, about 10x as slow at is as I was with the old laptop's pointer. You don't realized how often you copy text around that way until it becomes easier to just re-type it.. The two mouse buttons are not very conveniently placed, their positioning makes it hard to do a one-handed click and drag.
• The case doesn't feel as solid as my old laptop's. It's also an inch longer, which makes it seem less safe to toss it in the bottom of my backpack and run around with it than the old laptop, which was basically an indestrictible little lump. All the other changes made to the case design seem like improveents, except they used a blue LED for the power indicator, which like all blue LEDs is too bright to be comfortable at night. I'll probably use some whiteout on it.
• The battery lasts 4.5 hours real usage without any tuning beyond cpufreqd, which is quite nice. I haven't felt the need to add in a bay battery yet; that battery should bring it up to ~11 hours.
• The drive is one of those new really tiny laptop hard drives, and it's whisper-quiet. I have to put my ear right on the bottom of the case to hear it.
• The speakers are quite a lot better (for laptop speakers). The internal dual microphone array seems to not be very sensative at all, I wonder how much work the windows drivers for it do in software? The keyboard sound controls don't work in linux, which is a pity.
• The fingerprint reader and card reader are the only bits not yet supported by linux. If you care about non-free firmware, only the wifi needs that.
• 3D works; I can finally try out most of the new games that have been written in the past 6 years or so. Whee..

Amaya's recent loss reminds me of all the little friends I had when growing up. Mr. Nitty, Roo, Minette, Scuffy, Scit-Scit, Noisette and Mr. Bean. Mr. Nitty, Roo and Minette died of old age. Scuffy, Scit-Scit and Noisette were all Burmese and all had congenital heart defects. We suspect some inbreeding there, but they were all amazing cats. Mr. Bean got hit by a car. That was rough. He was a real sweetheart, and I was playing with him maybe 10 minutes before he was killed. Luckily my parents current cats, Fuji, Moxie and Mr. Bigglesworth are doing well. I also miss Doogie and Scuba, the cats I had with my ex-girlfriend. Scuba especially was just so full of life and affection. Losing little friends is always awful.

Greenpeace has asked companies to minimize the usage of toxic substances (English article) in computers and other electronic devices at this year's Cebit. Hewlett Packard, LGE, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sony and Sony Ericsson have assured Greenpeace to reduce toxic substances in their products in the nearer future. However, many other companies have ignored Greenpeace so far. For example: Acer, Apple, Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, IBM, Lenovo, Panasonic, Siemens and Toshiba. I'm listing the names of these companies here in the hope to increase public pressure on them a bit ;-) Although I'm not a member of Greenpeace (yet?), I do support the ideas and work of Greenpeace, and especially the above E-waste article made me think. We're all using more and more computers, PDAs and other gadgets — especially the geeks among us. I think we all should (at least to a certain degree) care about how this affects the environment. I have fired up a search engine and looked for some hints about what you can do as a computer geek in order to help save the environment — guess what... there's a HOWTO for that, the Linux Ecology-HOWTO! (I'm beginning to think that there's no topic out there anymore, which hasn't been covered in a HOWTO by some Linux geek ;-) (via netzpolitik.org)

Yeah, my Fujitsu laptop has been dying for a year or so, it's had surgery for power, batteries, hard drive, sound, etc, it's lost every bit that could break off and still have a usable laptop (all the suede on the bottom, the lid fasteners, the pcmcia blcker, the case around the base of the lid.. the still working pcmcia eject button is my one remaining sacrificial breaky bit). It's got the marks to prove cats love it, along with all the results of throwing it in my book bag and taking off with no concern for carrying a laptop around. The screen has 4 or 5 dead pixels and recently one faint patial dead scan line. The lid is getting worryingly wobbly. The CD drive was once crushed in an airplane and then banged back into shape so it still fits in the machine and even ejects OK. I've rubbed the letters right off some of the keys on the keyboard. The speakers turned black and exuded some glue or something long ago during a hot summer, one of them is barely audible. The headphone jack broke. Oh and the laptop is also abused regularly by programs like firefox and openoffice that really didn't expect to run on a 900 mhz crusoe. All that, I can live with. The laptop bears its marks with pride, and amazingly, people still occasionally ooh and awe at it. Although more likely from a bit of a distance these days. The newest wrinkle is that I'm beginning to exceed the design specs for the keyboard. Apparently they just didn't design for it to be used so much. First some keys stopped working half the time on some days, yeilding the famous irc sessions where joeyh tlks without ny A's. Then the Function key's membrane stopped pushing it back up, so it always appears pressed, though still works. Now the Alt key is going the same route and the right side ofthespacebardoesn't work, leadingtoircsessions whereItalklike this. And it just feels like I can't touch type on it half the time anymore. A new keyboard is $100 or more. I think it's time to retire this to a d-i test machine and start looking for a new latop.

---

I looked at the IBM X-41 again, really like it, but still can't get past the low res display and fan. Especially with some reports that the fan runs constantly in linux. I looked at all the stuff on dynamism, but wasn't impressed enough to consider it. At the moment the Fujitsu P7120 is looking mighty appealing. Hey, it's even got the suede bottom again. And no fan.. Only problem is it has a touchpad.

My laptop's hard disk is failing. So it looks like I'm temporarily going back to the disk I bought this one to replace, since I thought that old disk was going to fail eventually. From 80 gb to 20 gb -- ouch -- luckily things will still just barely fit. Also luckily I started backing it up last weekend when it first started making loud noises rather than today, when it first started having DMA errors. Besides making drives that fail after 100 days of uptime, Fujitsu has a fairly horrible warantee program; they won't send a replacement drive before I send mine in and they want to keep it for up to 45 days before replacing it. And they won't even provide a mailer. Totally useless, except as a way to get a new drive back from them at some point, to sell on ebay to get back some of the money for the non-Fujitsu drive I'll have to buy now. Or am I just spoiled by other manufacturers overnighting a replacement drive and a prepaid mailer to send the bad one back in? Probably.

There is a certian attitude some people I know have about the 2.4 kernel that I find really annoying. It's basically that it's obsolete, unsupported, not worth bothering with, should be dropped immediately, etc. And that's a reasonable position until you look at the sheer mass of machines out there that have not been able to upgrade to 2.6 yet, and the many places where all the new stuff (initramfs generators come to mind and so might udev) surrounding 2.6 is simply not ready for users. And the total lack of care that many of these same people have about providing any kind of reasonable upgrade path for 2.6. Well, after trying each new 2.6 kernel on my fujitsu laptop as they came out over the years from 2.6.2 on, I've finally found one that seems usable on it as a replacement for 2.4. It's just passed the main smoke test of being able to suspend and resume while playing music and downloading a file without missing a beat (using apm; the apm vs acpi thing is much like the 2.4 vs 2.6 thing I mentioned above, except acpi is unlikly to work for anyone). I'm not sure it's the kernel itself that started working; my main problem before was disk access hanging on resume, and I've recently replacd my hard drive, and perhaps 2.6 only had problem with my old model of drive. So anyway, it works for me, therefore it is perfect, so I can now without any qualms enter the ranks of the 2.4 snobs.

* 1. General Public License. This program is free software, and may
* be redistributed or modified subject to the terms of the GNU General
* Public License (version 2) or the GNU Lesser General Public License,
* or (at your option) any later versions ("Open Source" code).

* 4. Notices. User hereby agrees not to remove, alter or destroy any
* copyright, trademark, credits, other proprietary notices or confidential
* legends placed upon, contained within or associated with the Software,
* and shall include all such unaltered copyright, trademark, credits,
* other proprietary notices or confidential legends on or in every copy of
* the Software.

Mmhmm.

6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the
Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the
original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to
these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further
restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to
this License.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE. NO GPL INCOMPATIBILITY. NO PROBLEM. ENTIRELY HAPPY. NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO BE CONCERNED ABOUT, CERTAINLY NO COPYRIGHT ISSUES WHATSOEVER

#ifdef __cplusplus
extern "C"

#endif

(Note: kernel module code)

#if LINUX_VERSION_CODE < KERNEL_VERSION(2,4,0)
#define get_zeroed_page get_free_page
#define try_inc_mod_count(mod) ((mod && !(mod->flags & MOD_DELETED)) ? __MOD_INC_USE_COUNT(mod), 1 : 0)
#endif // LINUX_VERSION_CODE < KERNEL_VERSION(2,4,0)

#if defined(CONFIG_ALL_PPC) && !defined(CONFIG_PPC_PMAC) && (LINUX_VERSION_CODE < KERNEL_VERSION(2,6,0))
#define CONFIG_PPC_PMAC
#endif

ENTIRELY COMPETENT CODE WRITTEN ENTIRELY IN THE LINUX KERNEL CODING STYLE

Note to Fedora Core 2, 3 and 4 users:The default stack size in original FC2, FC3 and FC4 kernels is only 4K. Because some drivers require more stack space to operate properly, we recommend using a kernel with a larger stack size if you experience problems or crashes. You can either rebuild your own custom kernel, or get one of our replacement "stk16" kernels provided for your convenience through the distribution-specific Fedora Core 2i, 3 and 4 links above.

Or you could fix your drivers. Oh, except you can't, because they're actually chunks of the Windows one wrapped in code like the above.

This is truly an excellent piece of work.

Remember, kids, you're only paying $19.99 for code of this quality!

Linuxant are possibly worse than Orkut. And Fujitsu Siemens.