I Think(pad), Therefore I Am

I started a new job last week. My previous employer went bankrupt four months after they acquired my group from its previous owner. Though I still had a job at the time I left, health insurance was in limbo, there was nothing interesting to do, and prospects for the company were uncertain.

Anyway, the default computer setup for new employees seems to be a laptop, docking station, plus a good-sized LCD monitor. In the past I've usually shunned laptops as my primary development machine, but this is working out pretty well.

I installed Ubuntu Linux 8.04 and it plays fairly well with the docking station and the external monitor. I've set it up so that the desktop spans both the laptop's screen and the external monitor. It came with Windows XP, which I left on as a dual-boot option in order to sync with my iPhone.

I had initially installed the 32-bit version of Linux, then finally realized that much of the stuff I needed to build for work required 64-bit binaries. The simplest solution was to start over and re-install with the 64-bit version of Ubuntu. I was surprised at how well 64-bit worked - everything I needed was available from the repositories. 64-bit is often the neglected stepchild in the Linux world.

The laptop itself is a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 which is not a bad machine. The version I have comes with a good Nvidia graphics chip and a 2GHz Core2 Duo processor. We added 4 GB of RAM and it's quite snappy and still portable. The Thinkpad line formerly belonged to IBM before they sold it off.

The laptop retails for about $1000, and I'd highly recommend it. The keyboard is much nicer than my former Dell Latitude.


Jim on 06.01.08 @ 09:59 AM ET [link]