linux on the ibm x41

(I was going to send this email to the linux@lists.samba.org mailing
list, but in the period of an IM conversation with geckobob 
I realised the futility and redundancy of my endeavour.)

I recently became the proud owner of an IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad -- many
thanks to Hugh Blemings! I'm now interested in discovering what
pragmatic advantages there are to using Linux as my primary OS on it as
opposed to Windows XP. There are a number of features which presently
seem to be best supported (duh) and most useful (hence the pragmatic
approach, rather than ideological) under WinXP; if there is equivalent
functionality in Linux I'd like to hear about it.

I'm sending this email to the CLUG list in the hopes that someone in
Canberra has experimented with some facets of what I will shortly
describe and perhaps be able to guide me through their installation,
possibly as a sideshow to a forthcoming CLUG meeting. It's been too long
since I last attended one and I think by now I've managed to completely
digest all the pizza I ate.

Oh yeah, and IBM OzLabs. Right. 

UPEK (tm) Fingerprint Sensor
----------------------------

This is proving to be easier and more enjoyable to use than I
anticipated. No longer need I attempt to type my password multiple times
on the small keyboard of the X41 -- for the X41 is indeed small and my
current default password has long since become muscle memory rather than
anything I could write down for the authorities. Now I can simply swipe
my nominated finger across the sensor and unlock my "IBM Passport" to
login. (That's just one application of it -- I can use it as a BIOS
password replacement, certificate passphrase replacement, etc etc.)

This evening I googled for Linux's support of this sensor, and came
across this story on Slashdot:

  http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/11/0540217&from=rss

which leads to the BioAPI Consortium

  http://www.bioapi.org/

There exists a BioAPI PAM module:

  http://www.qrivy.net/~michael/blua/bioapi/

Much of this sort of stuff has passed me by in the last little while --
is anyone aware exactly how novel these software and consortium are? Is
anyone in Canberra working or researching in this field in or with OSS?

I'm vaguely aware of the penetration of Linux in Canberra's government
departments and associated companies: does anyone work for such an
organisation who has investigated the appropriateness and capability of
Linux for such a task and would be prepared to divulge that knowledge
either on list, or ... at a future CLUG meeting if it hasn't already? It
would be a further incentive for me to attend!

Hard disk motion sensor
-----------------------

Oh. I was going to ask if there was a way to emulate the capability of
the Windows which sense movement of the laptop and parks the HDD head
when necessary. I googled (hooray google!) and came across this:

  http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people/marksmith/tpaps.html

He's got a sourceforge project:

  http://sourceforge.net/projects/hdaps/
  http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum=hdaps-devel

That's cool. Good work, IBM. (39 downloads in the two weeks since it was
released? Surely more people need to know about it... or the right
people need to learn how to put it to use.)

Some recent threads on the linux-thinkpad list:

http://mailman.linux-thinkpad.org/pipermail/linux-thinkpad/2005-July/027326.html
http://mailman.linux-thinkpad.org/pipermail/linux-thinkpad/2005-July/027356.html

Linux desperately needs to catch up to this:

  http://www.kernelthread.com/software/ams2hid/

Power mangement stuff
---------------------

I see there's the ibm-acpi project on Sourceforge which unfortunately
lacks some useful immediate ... so long as I can continue to get 5.5-6
hours in maximum battery life mode, I'm happy.

I think I've lost the momentum to continue this email, and I'll now
convert it to a Livejournal post.

Other things I need:

 * WINE support for both Adobe Photoshop 2 and World of Warcraft
 * ...


Here's the IM conversation that caused me not to send it to the list:

(21:54:35) Carlo: blah blah computer blah, eh
(21:55:37) edlang: heh
(21:59:00) Carlo: my T40 just hung solidly after I clicked a link in 
firefox... quite rude
(21:59:09) edlang: in linux?
(21:59:19) edlang: I'm writing a post to the clug list about my possible
conversion to linux
(21:59:26) edlang: with a list of feature demands I deem necessary
(22:00:19) Carlo: yeah
(22:00:25) Carlo: ahuh
(22:00:29) Carlo: what features?
            22:00
(22:01:23) ***Carlo tries latest 2.6.12.3, swsusp2...
(22:02:30) edlang: fingerprint sensor, battery life management and power
management, hard disk motion sensor, wine support for photoshop 2 and
world of warcraft
(22:03:01) Carlo: fingerprint thing has been much discussed in
linux-thinkpad recently
(22:03:07) edlang: yeah?
(22:03:11) Carlo: also harddisk motion sensor
(22:03:14) edlang: hmm
(22:03:17) Carlo: both are bleeding edge
(22:03:29) edlang: yeah
(22:03:38) Carlo: what battery life management are you wanting?
(22:03:40) edlang: I'm googling for stuff now, projects for both have
been released in the last two weeks
(22:03:42) edlang: well
(22:03:56) Carlo: i could just send you my mondo-dvd ;)
(22:03:56) edlang: the other day I accidentally left it plugged in when
it was fully charged
(22:04:11) edlang: a little while later I noticed a little notification
in the battery status area, clicked on ti
(22:04:34) edlang: it brought up a dialogue box saying how running off
AC all the time was bad for the battery, and that it could manage the
charging / discharging cycles to maximise battery life
(22:04:38) edlang: Can linux do that already?
(22:04:44) Carlo: ah
(22:04:48) Carlo: this was also on linux-thinkpad a few days ago
(22:04:51) edlang: I thought that was really cool
(22:05:00) Carlo: linux doesn't do it
(22:05:08) Carlo: but it sounds like a straightforward hack
(22:05:22) Carlo: I wrote my own fan control daemon
(22:05:34) Carlo: optimised for my own laptop's typical temp readings
            22:05
(22:05:55) Carlo: #define MAXTEMP_CPU 43
#define MAXTEMP_PCI 47
#define MAXTEMP_HDD 35
#define MAXTEMP_GPU 47
#define MAXTEMP_BAT1 32
#define MAXTEMP_BAT2 26

// Time, in seconds, between checks of the temperature.
#define SLEEP_TIME 10

(22:06:42) Carlo: and so forrth
(22:07:36) edlang: mm
(22:08:54) Carlo: quite dodgy
(22:09:11) Carlo: so I discovered that if the fan's off, you hit the
swsusp2 hibernate thing, it gets into a loop (a bug), then your cpu
melts
(22:09:28) Carlo: thankfully that happened in cannberra and I found it
an hour later... if in Brisbane it would've been nasty
(22:09:33) edlang: heh
(22:10:15) Carlo: i reckon swsusp2 is the shiznit for suspending, too
(22:10:22) Carlo: acpi/apm is just such a big load of horse nuts
            22:10
(22:11:50) edlang: mm
(22:13:21) Carlo: some weird hellish power loss in acpi S3 state
(22:13:32) Carlo: whatever the hell these goddamn S0/S1/Sn states mean