Review: Second Generation Lenovo Carbon X1 with Linux

As a Christmas present to myself, I decided to get a new laptop. My second generation Dell “Sputnik” Ubuntu Edition is getting a little long in the tooth. The screen resolution of 1366×768 is a little confining, and I’ve never been in love with the trackpad.

Now, while most of the folks at The OpenNMS Group are Mac users, the freetards in the group tend toward the Lenovo X1 Carbon. As Eric says, when it comes to Linux laptops you can’t go wrong with Lenovo.

Well, apparently you can.

While I ordered my unit in late November, it didn’t ship until the new year. I got the shipping notice the same day they announced the second generation X1 carbon at CES. Since I wanted the new shiny, I called Lenovo (their customer support is located in nearby Raleigh and is awesome) and returned the unit before it arrived. I then ordered the new model with the the extremely high density “retina” display. It arrived last week and I started playing with it this weekend.

In short: do not buy this laptop if you like Linux.

While sleek and stylish, the first thing they broke is the trackpad (one of my main reasons for switching). Instead of discreet mouse buttons like most Thinkpads before it, it is a single unit. I found it very hard to get used to using the “pseudo” buttons. Plus, it is mechanical and it feels really clunking when you press down on it.

The next thing they broke was the keyboard. While I’m not sure if the top row is OLED or just OLED-like, the functions keys are now programmatically displayed and gone are things like volume and contrast (those do exist when booted to Windows 8). And while I don’t know if this is new, but the “backspace” and “delete” keys are right next to each other which I found annoying, as I would often hit the wrong one.

But I could live with that, as it is only a matter of time before someone starts doing something cool with that technology and I could get used to the keyboard. Here is why I’m sending it back:

  • Suspend Doesn’t Work: Well, technically, resume doesn’t work. The system will suspend, but the OLED top row never dims and the laptop just starts heating up as something is obviously still running. The pm-suspend.log shows an error free shutdown, but once “suspended” you have to hold down the power key until it turns off and then reboot.

    UPDATE: I got this to work, sort of. Once Hibernate worked I ended up using this post to determine the issue was with the xhci_hcd (USB3) driver. I disabled it and now suspend works. However, the network doesn’t come back nor do the function keys.

  • Hibernate Doesn’t Work: Since this is a solid state machine with something like an 8 second boot time into Linux Mint, I’d be okay if I could hibernate instead of suspend. However, hibernate is just a shutdown with no warning to save your work.

    UPDATE: I got this to work, sort of. Removed the encryption on the swap partition and then updated /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume to match the new UUID and then “update-initramfs -u” to re-read that file. The resume isn’t always flawless (when run from the command line the mouse never came back and once I had to bounce the network).

  • Backlight Doesn’t Work: I like having a backlit keyboard. You can see the backlight come on when booting, but it never comes on when running under Mint.
  • Fingerprint Sensor Doesn’t Work: While I don’t know how much I’d use this, the model in this laptop by Validity Sensors (USB device ID 138a:0017) isn’t supported under Linux yet.
  • Weird Power Issues: Sometimes the unit fan turns on for no real reason, like something with Linux and the power management are out of sync.

I took this laptop on a road trip and was very unhappy with all of the effort I had to put into a system that was just supposed to work out of the box. At one point in time I changed a BIOS setting that wiped out grub (I had left Windows 8 on the system in a partition) and Windows Bootloader took over and wouldn’t let me back in to Mint. I finally based the whole thing just to see if that might help (I had to turn of secure boot to get Mint on it in the first place and thought maybe some weird UEFI issue was at play) but it didn’t improve things.

So it is a very sad day for those of us who looked to Lenovo to provide us Apple-quality laptops for Linux. Snatch up those Generation 1 models while they last or check out the new Dell “Sputnik 3“, but don’t buy this laptop.

Austin and the CAC

It’s been a busy week for me as I had meetings in Sunnyvale followed by a trip to Austin to participate in a Rackspace Customer Advisory Council (CAC) event.

I’m not sure why I was chosen to be on the CAC. While I have been involved with Rackspace since April of 2002 (nearly 12 years – sheesh) we only have one server there. We are looking to deploy a number of new products and we’ve chosen OpenStack as our technology and Rackspace as our provider, but we are in the development stage and haven’t deployed any of it, yet. But it is always fun to come to Austin so I was happy to be able to visit.

I arrived on Wednesday just in time for a networking event. We had a choice of a visit to the hotel spa for a massage, or beer.

Guess which option I chose?

About ten of us got into a van and were driven to the Austin Beerworks. This was my kind of beer tour: it started with us sitting at the bar and then it pretty much stopped. I started off with a red amber called “Battle Axe” and then moved on to “Black Thunder”. I was sold on its description as a “German-style Schwarz” beer, and it was pretty tasty (I really liked the Battle Axe as well). Unfortunately, some good conversation got in the way and I talked too much (imagine), so time ran out before I could try the Sputnik. It was worth it, since a lot of that conversation was with Carl and Nick from Simply Measured, and it was cool to learn about how they were using Rackspace to implement their solution.

At the evening event at Perry’s Steakhouse I was happy to see that John Engates had made it up from San Antonio. I last saw John on CBS News when he was talking about issues with the healthcare.gov website. As a thought leader on hosting he was called to DC to provide input on fixing that site’s performance woes.

As we were catching up, a very energetic man came up and joined our conversation. He turned out to be Robert Scoble. Of course I’ve heard about him for years, and it was a pleasure to finally meet him in person, and yes, he is as crazy animated as his reputation suggests. When it came time for dinner I ended up seated between the two of them, and I likened it to being the creamy filling in a geek Oreo.

John had just taken delivery on a new, bright red Tesla Model S, so I begged a ride back to the hotel. While I think electric hybrids like the Prius are cool from a technology standpoint, the Tesla is cool from a car standpoint first and technology second. The controls and instruments are accessed almost completely through a touchscreen, and you can control everything from what music you want to listen to through ride height using it (only the buttons for the hazard lights and the glove box are analog). Plus the thing is insanely fast with zero lag – press the pedal and it snaps your head back. With a measured zero to sixty mph time of 4.2 seconds, it is slightly faster than David’s stock Mustang GT.

Want.

On Thursday we got to work with a series of presenters who discussed existing and upcoming Rackspace products. I’m not allowed to talk about them due to NDA, but I’m very interested in Rackspace’s hybrid cloud model using OpenStack. I like the control and security of a private cloud but I look to the public cloud to handle peak traffic. While getting the two to work was a little kludgy six months ago, they have done a lot of work to streamline the process.

Scoble did a talk during lunch about his new book the Age of Context. It seems worth checking out, although I think I’ll pass on getting the $3650 Meta Pro goggles in lieu of Glass.

I also got reminded that I really need to check out the Chef project. Both Rackspace and most of the attendees are heavy Chef users, and it seems to be edging out Puppet in the enterprises I’ve come across.

Thursday night saw sleet, freezing rain and some snow descend on Texas, so the Friday session was a little lighter on Rackers than was planned (since many of them were going to drive up from San Antonio that morning). It was cool to see that Nathan Anderson , who was a programmer at Rackspace when I started with them in 2002, is now is a position of responsibility, even if that responsibility involves the billing interface. (grin)

It was a fun time, and it made me excited about the possibilities available using the Rackspace platform. Hats off to Sandra, Aisha, Cara and the whole Customer Experience team for a nice conference.

Nagios News

My friend Alex in Norway sent me a link to a Slashdot story about the Nagios plugin site being taken over by Ethan Galstad’s company Nagios Enterprises. From what I’ve read about the incident, it definitely sounds like it could have been handled better, and it points out one of the main flaws with the “fauxpensource” business strategy.

I assume that at least two of my three readers are familiar with Nagios, but for the one who isn’t, Nagios is one of the most popular tools for monitoring servers, and it has been around just as long as OpenNMS (the NetSaint project, the original name of Nagios, was registered on Sourceforge in January of 2000 while OpenNMS joined in March of that year). Its popularity is mainly based around how easy it is to extend its functionality through the use of user written scripts, or “plugins”, plus it is written in C which made it much easier for it to be included in Linux distributions. A quick Google search on “nagios” just returned 1.7 million hits to 400K for “opennms”
A few years ago Ethan decided to adopt a business model where he would hold back some of the code from the “core” project and he would charge people a commercial licensing fee to access that code (Nagios XI). If your business plan is based on a commercial software model, then your motivations toward your open source community change. In fact, that community can change, with projects such as Icinga deciding to fork Nagios rather than to continue to work within the Nagios project framework.

Enter the Nagios Plugins site.

To say that Nagios Plugins was instrumental to the success of the Nagios application would be an understatement. Back when I tracked such things, there were way more contributions of both new plugins and updates to existing plugins on that project than were given to the Nagios code itself. The plugins community is why Nagios is so popular in the first place, and it seems like they deserve some recognition for that effort.

Trademark issues within open source projects are always tricky. Over a decade ago a company in California started producing “OpenNMS for Mac”. Even though we had OpenNMS on OS X available through the fink project, it required a version of Java that wasn’t generally available to Mac users (just those in the developer program). However, that version was was required to allow OpenNMS to actually work at scale, but this company decided to remove all of the code that depended on it and to release their own version. Unfortunately, they called it “OpenNMS” which could cause a lot of market confusion. Suppose a reviewer tested that program, found it didn’t scale, and decided to pan the whole application. It would have a negative impact on the OpenNMS brand. After numerous attempts to explain this to the man responsible for the fork, I had to hire a lawyer to send a cease and desist order to get him to stop. It was not a happy experience for me. When you give your software away for free, the brand is your intellectual property and you need to protect it.

So I can understand Ethan’s desire to control the Nagios name (which is actually a little ironic since the switch from NetSaint to Nagios was done for similar reasons). He has a commercial software company to run and this site might lead people to check out the open source alternatives available. Since they are based on his product, the learning curve is not very steep and thus the cost to switch is low, and that could have a dramatic impact on his business plan and revenues.

At OpenNMS we treat our community differently. We license the OpenNMS trademark to the OpenNMS Foundation, an independent organization based in Europe that is both responsible for the annual Users Conference (coming to the UK in April) as well as creating the “Ask OpenNMS” site to provide a forum for the community to provide support to each other. They own their own domains and their own servers, and outside of an small initial contribution from the OpenNMS Group, they are self funded. Last year’s conference was awesome – the weather notwithstanding (it was cold and it snowed).

OpenNMS is different from Nagios in other key ways. At its heart, Nagios is a script management tool. The user plugins are great, but they don’t really scale. Almost all of the OpenNMS “checks” are integrated into the OpenNMS code and controlled via configuration files which gives users the flexibility of a plugin but much greater performance. For those functions that can’t be handled within OpenNMS, we teach in our training classes how to use the Net-SNMP “extend” function to provide secure, remote program execution that can scale. OpenNMS is a management application platform that allows enterprises and carriers to develop their own, highly custom, management solution, but at the cost of a higher learning curve than products such as Nagios.

Now that doesn’t make OpenNMS “better” than Nagios – it just makes it better for certain users and not for others (usually based on size). The best management solution is the one that works for you, and luckily for Nagios users there are a plethora of similar products to choose from which use the same plugins – which I believe is at the heart of this whole kerfuffle.

The part of the story that bothers me the most is the line “large parts of our web site were copied“. If this is true, that is unfortunate, and could result in a copyright claim from the plugins site.

To me, open source is a meritocracy – the person who does the work gets the recognition. It seems like the Nagios Plugins community has done a lot of work and now some of that recognition is being taken from them. That is the main injustice here.

It looks like they have it in hand with the new “Monitoring Plugins” site. Be sure to update your bookmarks and mailing list subscriptions, and lend your support to the projects that support you the most.

Glasshole

Back in December a friend of mine I met through OpenNMS offered up a Google Glass invite. While I have privacy concerns about the whole thing, I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to play with the technology, so I accepted.

Well, it took awhile, but this week Google got around to offering me the opportunity to become an “Explorer”. After putting in my code, the Glass was added to my Google Wallet shopping cart and soon on its way via overnight shipping to the office.

Unfortunately, I ran into a problem right out of the gate. Apparently Glass doesn’t fit my head. While the picture above looks pretty normal, in order to actually see the screen I have to do this:

And that is painful. I soon had a vicious headache that stayed with me until I went to bed.

The way the Glass display works is pretty cool. It sits in front on the right eye and consists of an optically clear rectangular solid (made of plastic I believe). I’m going to call it a “cube” for lack of a better word, even though it is twice as wide as it is tall so it isn’t officially one.

The left side of the cube is mirrored, and the LCD is actually located on the right side, perpendicular to the long side of the rectangle. In the middle of the cube, at a 45 degree angle, is some sort of optical material that serves as the actual “display” – light from the LCD on the right passes through it, hits the mirror and then gets diverted toward the user’s eye.

The right earpiece is also a touchpad and you can interact with the device by swiping your finger along it. You pair it via Bluetooth with your phone, and that allows the Glass to have network access, although you can connect it via Wi-Fi as well.

But to be honest I never got to play with many of the features simply because I could not see the damn screen very well. I called the support line to see if there was anything I could do to adjust the screen on the glass downward, much like the “heads up” display on my wife’s car can be adjusted vertically, but unfortunately if you can’t get it to work by adjusting the nose piece you’re out of luck. You can rotate the display slightly left to right, but that wasn’t my problem.

The return process seems pretty easy. I called Google and they are sending me a box and shipping label. Once they get it and confirm it is not damaged, they will refund my money (and considering that the only thing I took out of the box was the Glass itself I’m not expecting any problems).

To say I’m disappointed is an understatement. If the display could just be a little lower in my line of sight I would have experimented with it a great deal. I’ve even taken it out of the box no less than three times during the writing of this post to see if some adjustment would give me some relief, but all I got was a headache.

I hope the return box shows up soon so I’ll quit trying to play with it.

Welcome Ken!

As you might imagine, things have been a little hectic around here this week, so I almost forgot to share a great piece of news.

Ken Eshelby, a longtime OpenNMS user and frequent attendee at the OUCE, has joined our team as a consultant. I am excited to be working with him, as in his previous job he did one of the most amazing OpenNMS customizations I’ve seen.

I asked him for a picture and this is what he sent to me. Not sure of the context …

I'm CEO Again (sigh)

It is with a heavy heart that I have to announce that Ron Louks, our CEO, will be transitioning to another job.

He has been given an opportunity that he just couldn’t refuse: to own the devices division of Blackberry, and if anyone can turn that company’s fortunes around, it’s Ron.

Plus Ron, being Canadian, feels a certain national pride in making Blackberry a success. It’s definitely a challenge but I can’t think of a better person for the job.

Ron will still be involved in OpenNMS as a Board member and will continue to work to help us execute our business plan.

All of us at OpenNMS wish him the best of luck.