Linux on a ThinkPad X60: Gelignite Child, Ignite

Stellarium, running on Linux Mint 14, on a ThinkPad X60.

In the previous post I wrote about an ancient IBM ThinkPad 600X laptop, and at the end I decided to try out a bunch of Linux distributions on it. Not many of them worked, and I was worried that the post made Linux look bad in an unfair way. The 600X is very old and Linux has come a long way since 1999. Back then it was just starting to come to the attention of the mainstream, judging by this charming article from the New York Times from January of that year. I learn that Linux rhymes with Cynics, which is the first time I've heard that particular pronunciation. Of course, as any fule kno it is pronounced LAY-newzzzzz.

In 1999 Linux plus Apache was the web serving solution that ran well on everything; its enemy was Windows NT. Ordinary people weren't expected to use it as their desktop operating system although it was perfectly feasible to do so. StarOffice, the GIMP, and Netscape all existed back then, but Linux itself was difficult to get working properly. Nonetheless the Linux Men had a dream of full spectrum domination, and that eventually led us to the present day, and desktop-orientated Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and the others, although the press only cares for Ubuntu.

Also James Cameron's Titanic (1997) was made with Linux. He navigated to dev/usr/titanic and typed make and then insmod iceberg and the film was pretty much finished. There's a popular theory that Leonardo DiCaprio has only ever played one character in all of his films, and that "Jack Dawson" from Titanic faked his death and grew up to be Jay Gatsby of The Great Gatsby, who used his fortune to build an aeroplane business - but he started to lose his mind, and hallucinated that he was other people. Viewed in this way the depth of DiCaprio's vision is staggering to behold, the commitment. And what if "Leonaro DiCaprio" is himself a performance, what then? Are we all extras in his film, without realising it? Our actions controlled by an unseen director, according to a screenplay that was shown to us once, briefly, at the moment of our conception. Perhaps, in his final film, in the last scene of his final film, in the last moment DiCaprio will turn to us, the audience, and say one word. "Die".

The screen will cut to black and we will be alone in a darkened room, not knowing if our thoughts are the final eruptions of a dying mind or those of a man sitting in a darkened room. But, yes, it felt unfair to try out Linux on a ThinkPad 600X. It's a very old laptop. Now that I have a pile of Linux CDs sitting around, I decided to try them on a more modern machine, a ThinkPad X60. A 1.83ghz Core Duo from 2005. Built-in wi-fi, 12" screen, Intel 950 graphics chip - not a very good chip, but widely-supported. I use my X60 as a kind of high-powered netbook and it has aged well. In the eight years since it came out it has aged better than the 600X had aged in 2007, if you catch my drift.

One thing the X60 doesn't have is an optical drive, though. Optical drives are a throwback to a bygone age. Luckily I also have the X6 Ultrabase docking station, which has an Ultrabay slot for a DVD drive. The Ultrabay slot can also accommodate a small battery, and - best of all - a second hard drive:

The hard drive caddies are still manufactured, although unofficially - I got mine for £7 from Malaysia, and it works just fine. My other modern ThinkPad, an X61, has an internal SSD, and the Ultrabay caddy lets me add a conventional HDD so that I can store masses of data.

As you might expect, the X60 has no problem with modern Ubuntu distributions. Here it is running the Xubuntu 12.04 live CD:

Peppermint 3 booted to the Live CD environment just fine, but Lubuntu threw up a cryptic "system problem detected" error, which is the kind of thing that gives Linux a bad name. I remember the first time I tried Ubuntu; it installed and seemed to work, but couldn't detect my widescreen monitor unless I edited xorg.conf. The same people who have no problem with this mock Windows 8 because the shutdown button is slightly less obvious.

After taking out the Lubuntu CD and smashing it, something hit me - not fragments of the CD, but an idea. The X60 is modern enough to boot from a USB stick, so why am I bothering with CDs? Why? So, with the help of the handy Universal USB Installer I burned... wrote Linux Mint 14 to a USB stick and stuck it in. Stuck it right in. Good and proper.

Data was once stored on physical objects. Here are some of them. Each new generation was smaller but held far more data. Data storage is now insubstantial but infinitely huge.

Let's see if I can install Linux Mint 14 alongside Windows 8. There was a time when the thought of setting up a machine to dual boot with Linux and Windows did not appeal to me, and was not something I would on a whim. But times have changed. I could in theory just get rid of Windows 8, but I paid for it and it works. It has been blamed for causing the current PC market slump, but I can live with it. It's like a bicycle-mad friend who occasionally rabbits on about veganism, you learn to ignore the bits you don't like.

The X60 predates Secure Boot and uses an old-fashioned BIOS. Rather than install Linux Mint onto the built-in hard drive, I decided to put it on the second drive, in the drive caddy. I suppose this way I could install Linux onto several small hard drives, and just swap caddies when I want to swap distributions. Rather than mess around with partitions I just wiped the drive and used it wholesale. The installation was surprisingly, boringly automatic.

You know what I think derailed The Future Sound of London's commercial momentum? Obviously FSOL had something to do with it, with their unwillingness or inability to play live, or develop a cult of personality, or bring in a lady singer. But I blame ISDN, and three-for-two offers. Three-for-two offers were a staple of the UK retail scene during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Some shops, notably Waterstones, based their retail strategy on 3-for-2. Wind back to 1996, and fans of WipeOut 2097 associated FSOL with this and this:

That kind of milkshake brought all the boys to the yard, which in this case was the local HMV, where they picked up The Prodigy Experience that they had been meaning to buy for ages but hadn't bothered because they had most of it on the singles, plus a second album, and ISDN. Instead of spooky up-tempo dance music the noise that came out of the speakers was slow and mean. It's a great album and I love it to bits, but it wasn't the kind of thing likely to hook the kids. Their new album, Dead Cities, would have been a much better choice, but it wasn't a 3-for-2 because it was new. And FSOL stopped after that. By the time their next album came out, in 2002, FSOL wasn't FSOL any more, and the mainstream had closed its mind to new sounds.

But, Linux Mint. It installs and sets up grub, which boots to Windows 8 without a hitch:

Phew. It boots to Linux Mint as well, at which point it asks to install nigh-on 250mb of updates. After installing these and rebooting the OS takes up around 3.6gb:

To be honest, I don't believe for a moment that the designers enjoyed designing Linux Mint. It was probably enormously hard work for no reward, with a tonne of wasted effort, political infighting etc. Like so many hobbies, it relied on the hobbyists having fairly lucrative day jobs. And one day they will wake up and realise that they were shafted by people who did no work at all, but the next generation of enthusiastic fools won't want to know. Let them learn to sink by themselves.

Linux Mint 14, running in a dual-boot configuration with Windows 8, on a ThinkPad X60, using a second hard drive plugged into the docking station.

Why did I photograph the screen, instead of taking screen captures? 'cause it looks more real, that's why. The obvious limitation with this setup is that I can't use Linux Mint on the road unless I take the docking station, which turns my X60 into a very large subnotebook.

Now, let's see what happens when I remove the X60 from the docking station and try booting it up. It'll either work, or it won't work. (unplugs docking station, turns machine on) It doesn't work. Yikes. Nasty message, command prompt. BUT the passive-aggressive, utterly obnoxious, hate-filled (gritted teeth) and extremely helpful and freely giving Linux community has a solution, courtesy of a chap called Mr Witch in this post here. It involves using Boot-Repair, and telling it that the removable drive is in fact a removable drive.

Now, with the machine unplugged from the docking station, it boots straight into Windows 8. Yay! With the machine attached to the docking station, it... boots straight into Windows 8. Rats. But what if I change the boot order? Ah, that does the trick, Boot-Repair has presumably shifted Grub onto the removable disc. (checks) Indeed it has. When I boot from the internal drive I get Windows 8, when I boot from the external drive I get the Grub menu - which boots Linux Mint or Windows 8 depending on which one I choose. Now everything is groovy. ~~~shoa, I'm fukcin, in the words of Brandon Vedas. Switching boot devices temporarily is easy, but less elegant than booting from a menu, but hey. Life is less elegant than booting from a menu.

Ultimately, if you can get hold of a cheap used X61 or similar with the hard drive stripped out - which is very common with used ThinkPads, because they were business machines - and you have a small hard drive lying around, Linux Mint would be a very good way of getting a cheap, usable laptop. The internal caddy (e.g. the rubber bumpers and metal cradle that holds the internal hard drive) costs about £5 from eBay. Shorn of the ideology it makes very little sense to dual-boot it with Windows 8 if you only use the machine as a glorified netbook; Linux might be more flexible under the hood, but ultimately Firefox is Firefox. And Photoshop is Photoshop (and The GIMP is not).

Of course, Linux shorn of the ideology is like rhubarb crumble without the rhubarb. It's still edible, but it's no longer rhubarb crumble. It's just crumble.

EDIT: And shortly after writing the above, Linux Mint 15 came out. The team seems to have settled on Cinnamon and MATE as window managers, without offering KDE and XFCE as official options. I tried the Cinnamon version and it installed just as easily as Mint 14, although in the end I wasn't too fond of Cinnamon. Too flashy. It can be ditched in favour of KDE easily enough, but I want to explore new lands before I plant seeds in the soil around me. Next I tried the Debian Live CD, which booted in double-quick time but didn't detect the X60's wi-fi card. Then Lubuntu, which ran into an error during installation and refused to go any further. And then finally Linux Mint 13, the most recent long-term support version of Mint, which installed without a hitch. What happens next? I will gradually use it less and less, and then I'll forget my root password, and then I'll wipe it with something or forget about it.

Installing an SSD into an old ThinkPad X60

A while back I installed Windows 8 onto an old ThinkPad X61, and after five months I have grown to... I have grown to ignore it. Before Microsoft discontinued their cheap upgrade offer I took the opportunity to install Windows 8 on my ThinkPad X60 as well. The X60 was the X61's immediate predecessor. It was launched in 2006, and was one of the first laptops of any kind to use Intel's then-new Core Duo CPU, in this case running at 1.83ghz. Spec-wise it's very similar to a contemporary 13" MacBook - it has the same Intel graphics card, it even has a FireWire port - but with a 12", 4:3 screen running at 1024x768 instead of a 16:10 1280x800 widescreen.

And it's dressed all in black, like Joan Jett. This is one of the reasons why ThinkPads rock. They're much cheaper than used Intel MacBooks, too, although I'm not suggesting that Joan Jett is cheap. She would fetch a high price. Upgrade-wise I've always been very conservative when a new technology comes along, because I want other people to experience the pain and misery of failure first, and furthermore new tech depreciates quickly.

Solid state drives (SSDs) are one of the most interesting upgrade options of recent years, and the thought of owning one has nibbled away at my peace of mind. They're an elegant solution to the problem of data storage. Solid-state hard drives have been the next big thing since the 1980s, but until recently the price and capacity has kept them tantalisingly out of mankind's grasp, like nuclear fusion power or images of Christina Hendricks bending forwards. For example, here's an article from the June 1988(!) issue of PC Magazine on the bright future of flash memory, in the form of EEPROM modules.

"Flash EEPROM could provide the key to the PCs of the future: fast, secure machines with bigger memory-storage capacity - and no moving mechanical parts ... The nonvolatility of EEPROM raises some other interesting possibilities. Is there any reason why it can't replace floppy discs? I can't think of one. With surface mount and wafer-scale technologies, EEPROM modules may match 3 1/2-inch floppies in size and storage density."

And a reader letter from the October 1983 edition of the same magazine:

"Q: One of the main reasons why I would want to buy a hard disk for my PC is for convenient storage of programs. But could I save money and gain more convenience by adding EEPROMs and loading the program onto them? - Dan Proctor, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

A: I think you would find the EEPROMs (erasable, programmable non-volatile storage chips) are decidedly not cost-effective. For about $3,000 you can purchase a hard disk with 10mb of memory. this will hold perhaps 100 programs. The same amount of money would buy you approximately 300k of EEPROMS (not counting the cards to mount the chips) that would hold perhaps three programs."

It must have been painful for Dan. He could see the future, but he was trapped in the past, with the little people and their tiny minds. Modern SSDs can generally hold more than three programs - unless that program happens to be Max Payne 3. With an installation footprint of 35gb, Max Payne 3 would indeed only fit into a 120gb SSD three times. In contrast it would fit comfortably into a typical 2tb desktop drive more than fifty times over, so the ratio between magnetic and electronic storage is obviously more favourable than it was back in 1983. The 2011 Thailand flooding wiped out a chunk of the world's hard drive foundries and caused traditional hard drive prices to zoom skywards, which for the SSD market was the equivalent of those old musicals where the lead actress catches a cold, and her understudy has to go out as a naive young chorus girl and come back as a star. SSDs are that young girl. They can do whatever Fred Astaire can do, but backwards and in high heels.

In a way I already have an SSD - my old Asus Eee 701 has a 4gb SSD, which still works after all these years. The rule of thumb is that larger solid state drives perform better and last longer than smaller drives, and so I waited until the 120gb models had dipped below £100. Samsung's SSDs tend to get good reviews - everybody liked the 830 - and although the reviews have been mixed for the 840 (more later) it's temptingly cheap. The cheapest price I could find was from Amazon; they're slightly more expensive on eBay, which has always puzzled me. Why buy new technology from eBay when it's more expensive than Amazon? Is it a tax dodge, or part of a money laundering scheme? Or what? Here's what you get in the box:

Worth it for the cute little stickers. Before opening the jiffy bag I assumed it contained a card reader or some MIDI cables or something similar, because the drive is almost comically lightweight. SSDs don't need as much shock-proof packaging as conventional hard drives and are presumably much cheaper for manufacturers to ship in bulk, which must help offset their generally higher cost. Samsung includes some data migration software on the CD, although it's also available on Samsung's website. In fact the CD installation immediately downloads a complete installation of the latest version of the software as an upgrade, so you might as well use the CD as a cat-fascinator. Samsung also includes some bloatware that seems to have one useful function (it reserves part of the drive's capacity for error-correction).

Here's what the 840 looks like, next to a conventional HDD ripped from my X60:

Installing a modern new SSD into an elderly X60 is a bit perverse. The X60 has an old-fashioned SATA I interface, which has a top transfer speed of 150mb/s. This is a quarter the theoretical maximum transfer speed of the 840's SATA III interface, and roughly a third the drive's sustained transfer rate. SATA is backwards-compatible, and so the 840 works in the X60, it just wastes two-thirds of its potential. And yet in most other respects I don't have a problem with the X60 - with sufficient memory, even the original 32-bit Core Duo is plenty fast enough for basic stuff circa 2013, and the audio applications I use aren't generally CPU-limited.

Boxout: Ten Suggested Collective Nouns for Moths

1. A Majesty of Moths
2. A Muttering of Moths
3. A Motherhood of Moths
4. A Month of Moths
5. A Manoeuvre of Moths
6. A Merrydew of Moths
7. A Maundering of Moths
8. A Mentality of Moths
9. A Mystery of Moths
10. A Magniloquence of Moths

SSD's have a number of killer positives and a couple of drawbacks. In their favour they're lighter and less power-hungry than conventional hard disk drives, and they're much faster. They're also physically much more robust, because they don't have any moving parts. Install one in your laptop, and it boots up faster, opens things faster, shuts down faster, and lasts a little bit longer on battery power. Here's a short video in which my veiny white person hands prod my X60, before and after installing the drive:

First Iain Banks reveals he is going to die, and a day later Roger Ebert beats him to the punch, which wasn't unexpected but is still a blow. I've always thought of Roger Ebert as a kind of movie version of John Peel, a hip old man with a surprisingly deft command of his medium. Peel sometimes played records at the wrong speed, but he always put things right, and he could talk entertainingly non-stop without spluttering or saying something offensive, which is difficult. Roger Ebert's opinions were occasionally baffling - one star for Blue Velvet, two for Fight Club, three for Spawn - but you could always see where he was coming from, and he had the attitude of someone who had seen it, done it, proved it, and still loved it. I have been raising a glass to him since the beginning of this post, which explains why my mind is wandering.

On the other hand there are good reasons why SSDs have not taken over the storage world. Pound-for-gigabyte they're more expensive than good old HDDs, and large SSDs (north of 500gb) are so prohibitively expensive that they generally aren't sold to consumers. The £74 that I paid for my 120gb 840 would have bought me a 2tb 7,200rpm Seagate Barracuda with £10 left over to spend on (thinks) you can't buy much with £10 these days.

Consumer-level 2tb SSDs exist. Five thousand dollars. Very much a niche product, and as one of the commentators points out you can buy four 500gb SSDs for much less. In practice, desktop users tend to reserve the SSD as an OS drive, with a HDD storing masses of porn and Death Star blueprints etc. Yes, you can use computers for things other than pornography, I was just picking an example off the top of my head.

The other major drawback of SSDs is that they have a finite life span. Like love, and human beings, and the universe in general. The drive is divided into individual memory cells, which wear out after a certain number of read/write operations. The drive combats this by spreading data evenly across the disk, and by including a hidden reserve that is deployed when necessary, but for some people the write limit is one of those deal-breaking issues. The limited life is an inherent characteristic of flash memory, and has been around ever since the days of EEPROMS in the 1980s, in fact the PC Magazine article mentioned above points this out. Digital camera memory cards, mobile phone SIM cards and so forth have the same problem, although it's not as apparent because computer operating systems tend to generate a lot of read/write cycles. Whenever you boot your computer up it spaffs temporary files all over the place and if you have a limited amount of system RAM the OS uses the hard drive as virtual memory.

The 840 uses a new type of memory chip that costs less but wears more than Samsung's earlier 830, but nonetheless the estimates I have seen place the life at roughly ten years (with lots of writes) and much more than that for typical usage. Samsung also sells a Pro version which used the older, more robust storage standard. HardOCP pooh-poohs the non-Pro 840 in this review, but they seem to be reviewing it in the context of a desktop boot drive or high-performance laptop. I just want something that will turn my X60 into a kind of super-netbook with a taller screen, for light internet browsing. In fact the big draw for me is the physical endurance, which is important for a machine I expect to carry around. And there's nothing to stop me from cloning the 840's contents back onto my 250gb hard drive, which I will keep around just in case.

Still, installation. After spending an age fretting about sector alignment and whether I should reinstall Windows 8 from old-fashioned (ugh) physical media the resulting process was a bit of an anti-climax. Reason being that Samsung's migration software works and works well, or at least it did for me using Windows 8. You plug the SSD into a spare USB port and Samsung's software clones the internal drive onto the SSD, not caring that the two are different sizes. It aligned the sectors automatically. In my case the internal drive was a 250gb model but only 35gb or so was in use.

The tricky thing is that you need a way to power the SSD externally whilst you do this (unless your laptop has two hard drive slots, which it almost certainly doesn't). Fortunately I have one of these:

It's an endlessly handy sonic screwdriver that also lets me use DVD drives with my X60, which doesn't have an optical drive. It's also useful for extracting data from older hard drives that you might have lying around from your previous computer build, without having to stick the drives into an external caddy. Whilst waiting for the drive to clone I had a cup of tea and read a bit of Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, an old book from long ago.

Hoggart's thesis was that international media tends to displace the kind of local culture he grew up with, and to his credit he generally avoids being a fuddy-duddy about it. What makes the book noteworthy is that it was published in 1957, five years before The Beatles' Please Please Me and the concurrent invention of sex. Quite what Hoggart would have thought about the internet I have no idea. When I was growing up working-class culture was an affectation put on by the middle classes. Localised culture simply did not exist, and it's never going to come back.

Beyond Hoggart's immediate location there was Britain in general, but the majority of British mass media of Hoggart's day was naff, absolutely wretched in comparison with the American variety. And this hasn't really changed. Britain failed to produce a distinctive internet culture apart from American internet culture, which is for all of the English-speaking world synonymous with internet culture in general.

As I pondered this the drive cloned away in the background, which took about ninety minutes or so. I had already set up the BIOS to use discs in AHCI mode, which is apparently a very good thing. After slotting it back into the laptop I was disappointed to find that it worked straight away. No lock-ups, no cryptic pattern of beeps, no booting to the desktop and then immediately crashing, no ERROR 601. It did not release a cloud of toxic gas.

Windows 8 was developed during the SSD era. It recognised the 840 straight away - asking it to defragment the drive performs a TRIM operation instead. What's it like to use? The most obvious difference is the general lack of noise. The SSD isn't quite silent - it sounds like an insect navigating mountainous terrain at night - but it no longer ticks. The X60 feels slightly lighter although I suspect this is mostly psychological. Operationally the X60 is noticeably quicker, at least until the novelty wears off, which isn't very long. Applications seem to spring onto the screen and as per the video above the machine boots faster. I now have fewer qualms about picking up and moving the machine when it's turned on.

It would make even more of a difference on a machine with a faster SATA interface. Officially, the first small ThinkPad with SATA II was the X200, which came out in 2008, but the X61 is apparently SATA II compatible with an unofficial BIOS. Which I have already installed in my X61. And so for the next post I might just whip the drive out of my X60 and stick it in my X61 (after doing the necessary cloning).

Is it worth putting a Samsung 840 into an old machine? In my opinion if your laptop costs more than £200 on the used market and you use it at least once a day then yes, go for it. Keep the HDD for when you want to resell the machine (used SSDs aren't particularly in demand - what if the previous owner thrashed it?). The X60 is a borderline case. The older small-format ThinkPads - the X32, X40, X41 - had PATA interfaces, and although PATA SSDs exist the performance gains in such old machines are slight and don't compensate for the ageing infrastracture. Used X200s are so cheap on the used market you might as well sell your X60 and get an X200 instead. In fact the X60 still has the same problem it had during its heyday - it was quickly overshadowed by the X61, and nowadays the price gap between the X61 and the X200 is such that the X60 isn't a rational choice. I keep mine because I'm sentimentally attached to it.

On the other hand, if I had and regularly used a 1400x1050 X60 Tablet or the X61 equivalent I wouldn't hesitate to put an SSD into it. I would end up with a kind of end-game netbook/laptop/tablet hybrid with a quasi-HD screen for much less than the price of an iPad.