Fading Memories

Right, I take back every unfriendly thing I've said about Bluelink. They managed to get my new z60m laptop (and I may well be the first one to install linux on that machine, according to Tux Mobil) in Deventer the day after they took delivery themselves. It's a gorgeous machine. Pictures and howto-install later... I'm making recovery cd's right now.

Update

Apart from the singularly sticky Centrino and Windows stickers, and the silly location of the Escape key (which may be the final straw for my vi addiction), there's really very little wrong with this laptop. It's sturdy, got a gorgeous screen, a keyboard with a great feel -- almost as if I'm typing on a full-size keyboard -- and installing Linux seems pretty easy.

Kubuntu wasn't able to downsize the Windows partition, but SuSE 10 was. And SuSE has very, very beautiful screen fonts and in general a very polished install. But I also wanted to try Kubuntu, which I'm upgrading right now, while also restoring my home directory from the disk of my old Dell. (Which, despite promises hasn't been returned, repaired, to me before Christmas.) Bad Dell.

Updated update

Installing Kubuntu Breezy Linux on the IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad z60m:

• Suspend to ram works -- out of the box, if not with the fn-f4.
• Suspend to disk works -- out of the box
• After running sudo apt-get install libdvdread3; sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/examples/install-css.sh, dvd playback works, practically out of the box
• X11 works, right resolution and everything. I haven't tested 3D acceleration with the ATI X600, but dvd playback is smooth and that's what counts
• Sound works
• The drives are approached by default using the SATA drivers, which apparently implies DMA, which is good
• Mounting usd drives works (restored my home dir that way). However, Kubuntu mounts all partitions on the same mountpoint. Didn't know that was possible.
• Connecting to my camera works
• Wireless -- would have worked out of the box if the detection hadn't preferred the open, unprotected, default settings wlan of my neighbours.
• Wired network works

SuSE shows much the same, except that SuSE enables all the wierd and wonderful thinkpad buttons out of the box, including the suspend button.

The permanently running fans are a "feature" of many newer Thinkpads, according to ThinkWiki.

All I can say is, I wish every laptop were as linux-compatible as this one. There's not much heroics in this report -- if I find it necessary to do somethinge extraordinary I'll update this entry.

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I was right... Bluelink did not deliver my new Thinkpad. They did not even think to tell me that they were not going to deliver. I had to phone them. Of course they didn't know why they couldn't deliver or when they would be able to deliver. But they promised to find out and then phone me back.

The Bluelink salesman told me that my laptop wouldn't be delivered until January 2nd -- and probably not even then but a little later.

Right, money back time. He didn't like that and said he'd try to put some pressure on Lenovo. As far as I'm concerned, he can do that and tell me tomorrow whether that worked or not.

But why is it so hard to deliver a laptop that was introduced in October already? And why don't resellers inform their customers of delays? Why doesn't Lenovo sell direct, and why do they have such a large range of models when only a few will be available?

Update

Bluelink have pushed Lenovo really hard, it appears -- and now Lenovo will ship the Thinkpad December 22. And they contacted Tryllian very speedily. Excellent!

I am reading An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek. Additional Notes by Hennry Swete. The Grand Rapids seminary (mildly famous in the Netherlands because they revere our Kuyper, while we have almost forgotten about Abraham de Geweldige) have scanned the 1914 edition of this massive book, tagged it using something called "theological xml markup" and prepared a public domain pdf. With all the Greek, Hebrew and everything intact. It's really a great read, and I wish I had a similar book about the Hebrew old testament and another one on the New Testament, with a final volume on the apocrypha.

Read more ...

Someone from Kassa mailed Dell yesterday afternoon and today, within half an hour of me arriving at work I was phoned by Dell. Apparently you need a television show on your side to get service from Dell. The friendly man was simply dripping with obsequiousness and my 5150 is going to be collected tomorrow for repairs and will be returned to me in a week, and they will expedite fixing Irina's 5150 with all due celerity, or so I was promised.

But what does Dell think they have achieved here? I cannot be the only customer they have royally pissed off by holding off on the fulfillment of their duties for as long as possible, instead of simply contacting all people who have purchased a 5150 and offering a repair.

I was going to tag KOffice 1.5 alpha today, but I cannot do that because I haven't got the hardware at the moment. And in any case, development on KOffice is now going at such a fast and furious pace that it's hardly opportune at the moment. A little more time will make the alpha (which isn't intended to be feature complete, but to give interested people something to test) a lot better.

For instance, Thomas Zander, David Faure and Gary Cramblitt have been hacking on KWord a lot. Yes -- after a long period of stagnation, KWord is moving forward. Lots of bugfixes, a complete refactoring of the page layout code, a redesign of the document creation panel, much work on the document structure pane and a speech interface. And while multi-page tables are still a problem, the table code has been reworked and is now much more robust. Also nice: in the normal view the page is centered in the window, instead of bunched up to the left window margin. We should fix that for Krita, too.

Sebastian Sauer and Cyrille Berger have been working on scripting for KOffice (for now only Kexi and Krita use the scripting library, but it's useful for every KOffice application), and Cyrille has added Ruby support to the existing Python support.

Casper Boemann has added a 16-bit L*a*b colorspace to Krita and thoroughly reviewed the color management path making it very dependable. And now that Adobe allows anyone to download and package a set of high quality icc profiles with their application, the results are good, too. Casper has also added autoscroll to KPresenter and Krita, and the code is generic, so it can spread to other KOffice apps.

Casper and Zagge have been working on a new guides implementation that is really slick and very usable. It's used in KPresenter at the moment, but Zagge has promised me he'd re-use the generic library in Krita. And of course, Kivio and Karbon could profit, too.

Nikolaus is working in a special branch on making discontinuous selections in KSpread a reality, and we hope to get his work into 1.5. Ariya Hidayat has started on a much more effficient class for loading xml-based files, which should help with loading times for big spreadsheets, and there's also work being done on making KSpread more memory efficient, so those big spreadsheets will also work once loaded.

Dag Andersen has picked up KPlato -- the integrated planner application for KOffice which is going to be included in our release for the first time with 1.5.

And Peter Simonssen has together with Thomas worked on resolving one of the biggest KOffice problems: the startup dialog that gives you a choice between templates, recent files and existing files. The new solution has received a thorough usability test with real life usability testers on OpenUsability and that has resulted in more fixes and polish.

My fingers ache... If only my new laptop will be delivered today!

(I know I must have forgotten something, but I'm typing this on the train and haven't got access to my mailbox.)

I got mail from the "escalation" people from Dell's technical support. They were going to try to reach a solution in a reasonable time frame, a solution that should be acceptable to both parties. But that was a week ago, and no acceptable solution has been forthcoming.

So I mailed the people from the television show that had gotten Dell to open the special phone number, and they told me they were to mail Dell for me...

Let's see whether that will make things happen. In the meantime, my Thinkpad z60m should be delivered today. Again, having had experience with Dutch resellers, I'm thinking it won't happen today, but I might be surprised yet.

But why does Lenovo make it so hard to buy their products? Most resellers don't stock more than a small fraction of the Lenovo product range, and it seems that what they stock are the anemic bottom-of-the-range models. The first company silently canceled my order; the second company hasn't let me know anything.

Dell is really amazingly incompetent as a company...

Right, they have admitted in public that the Inspiron 5150 is broken by design. They have even instituted a special phone number for people with a broken inspiron. Right -- everything should go swimmingly now, shouldn't it? People phone, give their service tag, and the next day a van comes to collect the broken systems. Customers happy, Dell's reputation salvaged.

But no, the very friendly Michael from the special phone number told me the phone number is only for prevention -- i.e., sending replacement parts to people with inspiron's that haven't broken yet. He doesn't know when the parts will be sent out, perhaps only when they've got a large enough order of them. Which will lead to many more broken inspirons in the meantime.

If your inspiron is already broken, he cannot do anything for you and transfers you to the regular technical service. One hour later... Just like yesterday, on hearing that you've got a broken 5150, they want you to phone the special number again... The only thing they can do is take notes and have someone, perhaps, can't say when, phone me back. Back to square one. We're exactly where we were yesterday!

Come on, Dell! This your chance to do one better than Acer.

One of my colleagues brought this article to my attention. Dutch only, I'm afraid, but I'm linking anyway in the interest of getting as wide as possible a dissemination of it. Apparently, Dell has admitted to at least one construction problem with their Inspiron 5150 laptops (of which we have two), and has offered to replace motherboards for free.

Or so I thought... I called Dell on the special number this morning and was connected to a friendly man who, on hearing I had a broken 5150 connected me through to technical service, all the while reassuring me that everything would be fixed, no hassle, no problems.

But the young man at the technical service desk, a certain Yussef or a least his name sounded a lot like that, told me he couldn't do anything for me since I couldn't perform his diagnostic tests. Well, I'm in Amsterdam at the moment, and the laptop is in Deventer, and besides, I know what's wrong with it. But no, no tests, no replacement. And when he heard that the computer wouldn't start at all, replacement was out of the question. He'd decided that the wrong thing was wrong with my laptop, so I would have to pay for it myself.

Couldn't help me, couldn't connect me to his boss, and if I wanted replacement parts for Irina's 5150 I would have to call the special phone number again. The only thing he could do for me was to have someone call me back within a few days.

I don't understand Dell: they have blundered already, and instead of doing some damage control by replacing all motherboards, no questions asked, they tell people they won't replace a broken motherboard because it's broken for the wrong reason. Apparently they don't realize that if they have to do replacement for one design error, they will have to do it for all faults caused by all design blunders in this misbegotten chunk of plastic.

So, I called again, the replacement parts should be sent out today for Irina's laptop -- the man who answered the phone told me he could only deal with laptops that are not broken yet -- and I'll be called within half an hour about the broken laptop. We'll see... To be updated soon, I hope.