Lenovo Thinkpad X200 and Kubuntu Karmic Koala

I've got my replacement notebook about 2 weeks ago. It's a Thinkpad X200. Personally I think it's the perfect notebook for a system engineer like me. It's small, it's light, it has sufficient power to run all the necessary application. Since it's a new notebook, I thought why not fit it with a new OS, so I downloaded the (back then) new release of Kubuntu Karmic Koala beta release.

Installation
Since the X200 don't have an optical drive, I had to make a usb bootable disk. To do this I used the ubuntu usb-creator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Live_USB_creator). It took two usb disk for me to succeed. I don't know what's wrong with the first one though. After I got the usb disk, the installation went smoothly. I was able to rearrange my hard drive partitions (the X200 came with a windows Vista that I kept for gaming purpose).

First Boot
Compared to my old system (dual core, 2.5 GB Mem, Jaunty), the system boot really fast, although I can't tell if the improvement is because of Karmic or because of the X200. As promised, no more screen blinking, switching back to your terminal and back X this time, you'll just stay in X from the get go. All of my devices were detected and working normally, except for the internal modem (didn't even bother to try it) and the fingerprint reader. The fingerprint reader is different from the other thinkpad's reader and I weren't able to find the right module for it. And after seeing how easy it is to copy someone's fingerprint, I just stopped looking. Suspend to RAM works every time, while I had one failure with the hibernation. Hopefully it'll be fixed when the Karmic is officially released.

Every Day use
After using for about 2 weeks, normally I got about 3.5 to 4 hours of battery. If I really turned it down than I would get about 5 hours of battery. The temperature is quite low for me, I hardly noticed the fan working. Haven't really push it though, hopefully next week I'll be able to push it by running dynamips with 10 or more routers :). For Karmic, it's a beta but it's really nice and stable. I got new updates every day though. I've been using KDE4 since KDE4.2 so nothing new for me there.

Guangzhou day 2

Got stumbled today .. although is not exactly my mistake (more because of a bug) but it's enough to delay my work :(

Anyway, I finished my first lab set today and right after that, my instructor start 'destroying' my work to see if I'm able to fix it and I did it, although I need to able to work it much faster than this if I want to pass.

After that, I start preparing my second lab set. It's quite a tiring day actually but really satisfying..

On the other side .. this could be the strangest training I've ever had .. during the class, I could chat, eat, drink, browse, etc .. one time I even sang LP's 'somewhere I belong' with my instructor .. I could even leave the class to go to starbucks whenever I want to .. I decide how fast I want to go, how much I want to learn .. something new indeed ..

Guangzhou the city

It's much like Jakarta actually .. the people, the street, the weather .. BUT a lot cleaner than Jakarta and for some unknown reason, I haven't seen a single motorcycle here ..

Guangzhou will be hosting the 2010 Asian Games, so there are a lot of development going on here.

Guangzhou day 1

So the bootcamp has started .. as predicted, I don't get any training .. what I got was a list of lab test (57 pages of it) to work with. The instructor won't teach you anything unless you asked, so don't get smart, asked :D
I meet a guy who's working for DData (Datacraft-Asia parent company), he's taking the CCIE voice class. Also another guy from Turkey who is preparing for his CCIE RS exam.
All in all, the class was good, I've learn a lot from this one day. Hopefully I'll be able to finish this set tomorrow, review it and move on the next set.
The day ended with a birthday dinner for the turkish guy .. tomorrow night we are planning to take a boat ride on the river..

Guangzhou day 0

So I started my journey with a 4 hours flight to Hong Kong .. The flight, as expected was very pleasant.. I manage to get some sleep and watch a movie.
After that I have to wait for 7+ hours (more on this later on) at the Hong Kong international airport. Being me, the first thing I look was a place where I could access the Internet and charge my notebook. I finally bought a universal power-plug converter. Thankfully, there's a resting area where I could take a sleep comfortably.
The last part of my journey was 30 minutes flight to Guangzhou. During this flight, I was surrounded by scientist from all around the world. It turns out that there are coming over for a conference. Hearing their conversation kinda makes me feel stupid. Once I landed and met Wing from the training center, I found that I could and should have just taken a train from Hong Kong to Guangzhou rather than waiting for 7 hours at Hong Kong.
The hotel is good, the room doesn't have a bathtub like I wished for but it's okay. It has unlimited Internet access, although there are a lot of sites being blocked (twitter, facebook, blogspot). Thankfully there's TOR to the rescue. I won't be staying here for my 2 weeks training though, because of the conference, I have to move from one hotel to another. Wing said that I have to move 2 times during my stay.

two worlds ...

I've been living in 2 worlds for a while now ..

On one life, I'm a husband to a wife and on the other I'm a system engineer to one of the best company I know..

Can't combine the two, only wish that I could manage both..

guts feeling ...

have you ever got that strange, tingling feeling that something is wrong ...

that's what I got now ...

either that has something to do with this stupid issue i'm currently facing remain to be seen..