ubuntu blamed for eating hard disks

Seems like Ubuntu is being blamed for eating peoples hard disk drives. Apparently over aggressive power savings settings will trash your hard disk by parking and unparking it incessantly.


There's blame to be shared, but here's a complete description and several workarounds:

DanielHahler/Bug59695 - Ubuntu Wiki

Thinkpad T61: pre-rant

I've tried to give Lenovo a chance, but the Thinkpad brand isn't what it used to be. Sure, my T61 cost almost $600 less than a comparable MacbookPro, but cost isn't the biggest factor for me when buying something I spend so much time depending on.

So, while I collect my thoughts and get used to the machine here are some notes:

Category:T61 - ThinkWiki

link to purchase parts directly

Call 888-746-7426 for stock availability questions.

Battery Options
ThinkPad 6 Cell Li-Ion Battery (14.1inch standard screen and 15.4 widescreen) 42T4504 (Sanyo)
92P1139 (Panasonic) (cheapest)
92P1141 (Sony)

ThinkPad 9 Cell Li-Ion Battery (14.1inch standard screen and 15.4 widescreen) 40Y6797 92P1131 (Sanyo)
92P1133 (Panasonic)

Automated Device Driver generation

This is a great idea. I'd love to see it in action.

EETimes.com - Startup Vayavya unveils automated device driver generator

Linux USB Gadget API

Wow. Why haven't I seen this earlier?
http://www.linux-usb.org/gadget/

My chief complaint about USB has been there's no easy software interface like BSD sockets over ethernet. This seems to come pretty dang close to fixing that.

They even have an RNDIS stack, so you can look like an ethnernet node to a windows PC and do TCP/IP over USB.

psshutdown to the remote rescue

I remote desktop into the lab pc at work all the time. However, I can't get at the shutdown button in the start menu. psshutdown to the rescue.

From the command line of my development machine I can run psshutdown \\labpc01 -r -f, and blamo, in 20 seconds the lab machine reboots!

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/psshutdown.mspx

Apple's Bonjour for Windows

I've restrained myself from adding any trite French phrases. But just barely.

Bonjour looks great- servers register their services, clients browse to see if a service is available.

This is yet another example of why I love TCP/IP networking. It's a shame that TCP/IP over USB is not more widely done.

Apple - Support - Downloads - Bonjour for Windows 1.0.4