ThinkPad

Installation In my last post about my ThinkPad T40s I mentioned that I added a 256GB mSATA drive and installed Debian 13 + XFCE. Guided Partitioning doesn’t work when you install to 2 drives, it will just pick the first drive and create the necessary partitions. Manual partitioning is necessary. I previously mentioned I set up the drives as follows: Device Partition Mount Point Size Drive /dev/sdb1 /boot/EFI 1024 MB mSATA /dev/sdb2 / 226 GB mSATA /dev/sda1 /home 466 GB 2.5" SSD One of the cool things about having a large /home partition is that the root / partition can be backed up to /home using timeshift. Because I’m planning on adding and removing lots of software timeshift backups will become critically important. If I mess up the system adding/removing packages, running sudo timeshift will let me go back to the last backup. It’s worth noting that timeshift isn’t a /home backup, it’s an OS backup. Other software exists for simple data backups (thinking deja dup). ...

Overview The Lenovo ThinkPad T430s is the “thin and light” version of the Lenovo ThinkPad T430. I put “thin and light” in quotes because the ThinkPad T430s is quite bulky compared to thin laptops made in the past 5 years. The s in T430s indicates the slim version of the ThinkPad T430. Notebookcheck has a good review of the T430s. The review covers some of the differences between the T430s and the T430. Basically, the T430s is a lighter, less upgradable version of the T430. The T430’s processor can be replaced; the T430s’s processor is soldered in place. ...

I tried AI on my Lenovo ThinkPad T430s under Xubuntu Linux and it did something shocking! Yes, the heading above makes this seem like zoo of bad artificial intelligence videos on YouTube, but I was actually shocked at what happened when I tried to install Ollama on my ThinkPad T430s running Xubuntu Linux 24.04.2. Entertain me for a second and let me briefly explain why I was surprised: I’ve installed Ollama a bunch of times on hardware several years newer than my laptop. Ollama will run if you don’t have a modern graphics card (which sounds a bit strange since it’s mostly text based, but having a decent, modern Nvidia graphics card can really boost Ollama’s performance). ...

Past Isopropyl is a great way to clean up a lot of plastic, but I found that while it’s helpful for removing grime, caked on stickers (Goo Gone), and other crud, it doesn’t always leave a nice finish. A few years back a volunteer at the Computer Recycling Project mentioned interning at a small computer store where they used Mr. Clean Magic Erasers to clean up the top of ThinkPads. True to what he said, Mr. Clean Magic Erasers do seem to be a pretty good job on the top of ThinkPads. ...