My (updated) Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS technical experience (14" T61 w/ X3100)

Hello all,

Last time I did try Ubuntu 8.04.1 and things did not seem flawless by far, however this time, I have managed to fix all issues without much work. It is a bit like magic, because I myself am surprised (for the better.)

So now I am back after again installing and minimally tweaking the latest Ubuntu Linux on my Thinkpad, after trying advanced installs of Vista and XP. I wanted to share with you all impressions, since it may be useful information to all here and there wanting to try the same thing. Pardon me if I am intrusive, but frankly, forums are not only for asking for help, are they? ;-) I am not sure this all is indeed useful to anybody, but I know from experience I did benefit from reading stories like this. Do express your opinion, it is appreciated.

My machine is a CTO (Customized To Order) 14" WSXGA Thinkpad T61 w/ Intel X3100 graphics hardware. Intel Core 2 Duo CPU (Merom, Santa-Rosa platform) 2.0Ghz 4Mb internal cache. Seagate Momentus 7200.1 100GB harddrive (model ST910021AS). Intel 4965AGN Wireless hardware. Bluetooth (have no idea what exactly, only one option given at purchase AFAIK). 7-cell battery (unused, running from AC).

I bought it in July 2006. After two years running, everything seems fine. I am very happy with it, even though the new T400 looks at least as attractive.

Now to the details:

I did the vanilla install.

CPU:

SpeedStep works fine. Temperature of both cores are hovering around 30*C, read from 'libsensors' interface, identified as 'Core 0' and 'Core 1'. So far I cannot find information which sensors these are exactly, since I have about five or six sensors monitoring the CPU alone. The other temperatures are again 30*C, 38*C and 38*C. I simply cannot deduce what is what exactly, as I am not that proficient in either internals of my Thinkpad (did not take it apart yet, and even if i did...) or thermodynamics. However this time around Ubuntu does a better job with temperatures than either Vista or XP. This is probably within margins of error, because the EC (Embedded Controller) manages cooling on its own, being a separate processor itself, and it does so from boot-time, independent of the OS. As far as I understood, kernel does not interfere with fan control. This does not mean however that temperatures will be the same regardless of the OS, because EC does not manage SpeedStep related logics. Ubuntu has its own CPU scheduler and Windows have their own. I am running the 'ondemand' CPU governor.

There is a substantial issue with all sensor, CPU and temperature related things that manifests after hibernation and sleep (suspend in Ubuntu). As in either mode, fan is turned off, after the machine restores the desktop, the fan would seldom kick in at all. Once I put it back from sleep and left for a half an hour, only to discover later that CPU temperatures went up to ~68*C and the fan was still off. If the EC is responsible for the error, I do not know, but this is alarming. A half-an hour more (and the desktop was idle mind you) would probably initiate a shutdown due to sensors picking up overheating conditions. Same story restoring after hibernation. I am considering moving on to userspace or kernel based fan control, because so far I could not find what the issue is and whether it can or will be resolved through any kind of softwar update. The advantage with leaving fan control to Thinkpad internals as opposed to Linux taking care of it (through either kernel modules or userspace tools) is that EC is apparently a pretty advanced processor itself, separate from CPU, with its own chip(s) on the motherboard. Apart from taking care of the fan, it also takes care of battery charging among other things, from what I have read. So bottom line is, EC takes care of whatever it can take care of, then the CPU is left doing other things than monitoring the sensors and controlling the fan. We will see how this all goes with future developments of Ubuntu.

-Rest of the cooling story-

MiniPCI sensor starts around 32*C during idle and very slowly rises to 38*C as things heat up inside.

-Hard drive-

The big issue with the hard drive, and I do not know whether this is the case with Vista/XP is what concerns so-called Load Cycles. Every time your hard drive parks its head to prevent accidental scratching of the aluminium disk (that carries your vital data) the drive firmware increases the load cycle count, which is persistent across its entire lifetime. Most laptop drives are rated to perform 600000 parkings before the manufacturer cannot guarantee anymore that they give up spirit. The thing is through reading my load cycle count from the drive using S.M.A.R.T. interface (doing 'smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count') it reports more than 300000 already. On average, because of its power management, that is again either Ubuntu specific, or managed by drive firmware itself, the head parks the drive about 5 times per minute. Now, aggressive power management like this contributes some to the power usage of the laptop, also keeping the drive temperature considerably lower, but this means the life time is on average around 3 years. Consider yourself warned. It is possible to control the power management to effectively prohibit the drive to park heads, but this may open up for possibility for destroying it physically during when you do a lot of moving around with the laptop. I speculate however that the Thinkpad HDAPS (the system that is based around the motion sensor for again parking the heads when aggressive motion is detected) may effectively take place deciding when to park the heads, so that the otherwise paranoid head parking the drive would do itself is not necessary. Practice shows however that there is still the problem with high drive temperature readings, high enough to be uncomfortable under your right hand when typing. When I found that level of power management that slowed down the load cycle count increase substantially, the temperature reading of the drive when mostly idle increased from 30*C to 40*C. Conclusion is, even if you are serious about extending its lifetime by slowing down the head parking frequency, you are left with excessive heat output. A way of controlling the power management is through the 'hdparm' utility - 'hdparm -B [pm level number 0 - 255] /dev/sda' where 0 is theoretically most aggressive power management level and 255 is power management effectively disabled. In reality however, the drive may ignore certain values, and I am in the dark concerning the exact effect of different numbers sent to the firmware. I do know however that I succeeded at preventing the too-often head parking by sending the drive the value of 192. This is when the temperature started to increase however, so the benefit is disputed, given what you give and what you get.

-Fan-

Fan is fairly quiet at what appears to be the only speed I have seen it run at, when it does run - ~2950RPM. Since the EC takes care of it, and not me or Ubuntu, i currently do not experiment with it. Frankly the fan is most often on in Ubuntu, as opposed to Windows where it is about half of the time off. Mind you however, temperatures are considerably lower in Ubuntu, by some 5-8*C. I am sure EC has nothing to do with this, but I may be wrong.

-Desktop-

Compiz works out of the box and runs the display at native resolution of 1400x900 at very decent framerate when doing its animation, I'd say never dropping below 20 FPS at its most intense. Blur effect however does not work, no matter what I tried (i am referring to the Blur Windows plugin). It is most likely a Compiz issue anyway. I am very pleased with it otherwise, it does not even load anything when doing the stuff it does. It is as if the laptop does not even notice that the graphics system runs it all. Plenty of resources available. I remember running the previous Ubuntu versions through the non-accelerated window manager, and it did feel as if things were not optimized. Note however that Compiz increases power usage because of the OpenGL screen refresh bug. It may be fixed in the future. All in all, considering I am on integrated Intel graphics solution, and that I did play some 3D games when on Windows with it, it keeps up much better than what I expected from it and probably will ever need. Watch out for the Switchable Graphics solution that Lenovo has in the newer Thinkpads though, it appears to be the ultimate thing!

So apart from the issues mention, I do not think I will ever switch back to Windows, unless things go downhill for Linux. Which they wont.

P.S. Flash player for Linux still sucks. I know not whether it is sloppy coding (though I am betting my programming expertise on it) that is at fault, but the thing uses all CPU it can get its hands on, which is down right disgraceful of Adobe releasing such thing to the market. If you need a CPU-Burn alternative for Linux, use Adobe Flash Player, the only viable option. And I dont have to mention what happens to the laptops that need to run all CPU they can for prolonged periods of time (like when you play Flash games or watch YouTube).

All comments welcome.

 

Yikes, thanks for the info. I was considering Ubuntu, but I think I'll stick with a VM.

 

Just installed Ubuntu last night, loving it (as usual) so far.
I'll have to see if I get any similar/weird issues.
What are you using to monitor your temps? Oh, n/m looks like libsensors. But are you just using an applet or something else?

 

I am using the Gnome Sensors applet. You can install it using the Synaptics Package manager. Search for 'gnome sensors', I do not recall now what is the name of the package. It is only a GUI though, and yes, it can interface 'libsensors' but you have to install the latter too. It can also interface acpi directly, and the 'ibm_acpi' (which I find strange, because the acpi driver is called 'thinkpad_acpi' now). In other words, you do not have to have 'libsensors' installed, but it has readings from a whole bunch of sensors, which I could not identify in either 'acpi' or 'ibm_acpi' interfaces. 'libsensors' apparently gets its functionality by talking to the SMBus, a dedicated piece of hardware in most modern machines.

nicodemus: I tried to paint a picture, where actually i am having one or two issues with Ubuntu only. Its a matter of preference. I do not use Linux only because I like it better, I am using it to learn and am tired of all the blackbox software. Your mileage may vary Like you run Linux in VM, so I run Windows in KVM.