New M6500 Discussion Thread

I would have suggested to solve the problem under Xfce with xbindkeys/asound, but that requires the volume keys to send key codes which unfortunately they don't do. So sorry, I have no easy way to solve this issue.

 

No, it's fine...I removed Xfce....works great with LXDE

 

I may try doing that this weekend. I have an unused 500gb drive (not ssd though like my system and data drives) that I could install OpenSolaris on. I'm an Oracle developer and anything Oracle related I'm willing to give a go at I'm excited to try it, if I like it I may also install it on one of my other machines and keep it on.

My other plan is to run the new machine that will be arriving with the original drives that are in my current m6500. I'll use them for a few days to see if I still have the issues. If so then I reinstall the Win7 OS on one of the new SSD drives that will be arriving with the new laptop. Then I install a minimum of what I need to do business with to see if the problem goes away. I have a ton of VPN softwares and stuff like zone alarm, etc that are required for me to connect to my various customers servers. If it is software related it's likely one of those buggers. From there it's simply a matter of elimination, installing and using those apps one at a time over a period of a few days to see if the problem crops up again.

Fingers are crossed that it is a hardware issue *screen went black yesterdayand had to reboot ... trackpad froze up later that day and I did another reboot. Today it was jumping off to the right edge of the screen and not tracking smoothly, so I did another reboot. I just want this awesome piece of machinery to work I do love it still... not bitter

 

Well, OpenSolaris is not what I'd call "Oracle related". It's dying right now because of Oracle. I hope that Illumos will survive and become a worthy successor, but at the moment I'm sceptic.

 

Yes, we do feel a little apprehensive about OpenSolaris right now :\

I should have installed Gentoo before I left for Japan -- not sure I want to bother with getting it up and running through iPhone tethering under Linux right now (well, could do WiFi tethering and that would not be so big a bother, I suppose...)
(I'm a sucker for watching my system compile )


Oh, and as for the people who were talking heat in the past few pages.. 35 degrees here with over 90% humidity (no aircon on today!)... running stackloads of application and a thorough hard disk scan and it's still not over 75 degrees Of course it will run a little hot -- it's hardly an Atom powered machine

 

hmmm, perhaps i will try something other than OpenSolaris then.

 

What do you want out of your system? What type of work?

Also.. how versed in Unix-like Operating Systems are you?

For highly optimized jobs like compiling or rendering, I'd pretty much always recommend Gentoo. However, the work you have to put into getting Gentoo up and running correctly is endless, but you do end up with a system that runs great and very fast... until you realize you wanted just one more package ... then you have to recompile code for other packages to add support for what you wanted, and wait for all of that to finish, and *trails off into the distance*

So if you want more of a ready-when-you-need-it style system, I'd go for a more standard Linux distribution -- Linux Mint has just released a Debian-based edition, and there is always the usual suspects like Ubuntu, SuSE, Fedora, etc..

 

G'day -

Received my new M6500 today simultaneously with aftermarket shipments of 16GB RAM, 500GB HDD and 256GB Crucial SSD. Installed the RAM, installed and formatted the secondary HDD, set BIOS to ACHI and a fresh install of W7.

Question: Anything else I'm missing in making the SSD the boot disk? Opting for a clean file directory, I'll probably partition the SSD into "boot + programs", and "data", leaving the HDD for "archive".

Thanks!

 

I think the disk beside the battery defaults at the primary boot drive. Battery drive is listed as Drive0 and the 2.5 in the middle of the left side is listed as Drive2 in my machine.

 

initially this is just for testing purposes on my m6500 to see if my hardware failures are software/os specific or if these issues arise in a different OS environment.

Eventually I want to try a linux distribution (probably a standard distribution like you mentioned) on a seperate laptop to experiment with. I'd want to see if I can do what I need to do for my Oracle development and administion support, etc. But I'd need to do ALOT of experimenting. It'll be fun I think.

here is what I need to be able to do...

VPN to a few different companies networks. I use different VPN software depending on which company network I'm working with. And each one is a bit different and with their own firewall/security requirements (one customer required that I had ZoneAlarm).
- ATT GLobal Network Client
- Juniper
- Cisco VPN
- Checkpoint VPN

FTP and telnet tools. These I'm not worried about. I'm sure there are similar tools built in and included with some the LINUX distributions.
- WSFTP Pro
- SecureCRT

I'd need to be able to install Oracle 11g and Oracle Developer Suite and all of my other Oracle dev tools such as a Quest Toad equivelent (maybe Oracle OEM11g perhaps although I've never tried using it before). Again, not worried about these since they are shown on Oracles website as having installations available for Linux, Solaris, and HP-UX.

Finally, I'd need a way to connect to a MS Exchange Server to check my emails. Naturally I use Outlook today.

Those are just the bare necessities that I can think of. There are a ton of other tools I use in windows today but I'm sure I can find their equal within the Linux world. My biggest challenge I think will be with the VPNs. If I cannot connect then the rest doesn't matter.

I think I'll try Ubuntu first since I've read a few other Oracle DBAs have it on their laptops.

Thanks,

Ben