My work laptop's harddrive was unhealthy last Friday. At first I thought it could last a little longer but when I returned to work Monday morning it was returning various read errors and firefox wouldn't even start. I was able to start some more backup (as part of eating our own dogfood I've started backing up some of the stuff to it, but not all), but eventually rsync was having trouble reading the files too.

The new laptop is a ThinkPad X220, which is a little bit of an upgrade compare to the old X200 (quad core i5 instead of Core Duo). Unfortunately our PXE server only has Fedora Core 14, which isn't new enough to support the network card (which is a little problematic when you are trying to install over network). Downloaded and extracted the Fedora Core 15 bits to the PXE server, but that didn't work either because of some kernel OOPS which caused udevd (iirc) to die. Gave up, went home, put the install image to a USB drive and it installed fine from that.

Battery life is pretty good, the battery indicator said I had about 4 hours left, consider that I wasted a lot of time trying to do the install earlier and it was never plugged in. I mostly do my work on a shared server though so the laptop is mostly just a dumb terminal.

Gnome Shell worked okay. After disabling the braindead mutiple monitor/workspace preference it was even tolerable. FC16 is coming out in a month or so, hopefully the extensions that I rely on will still work. The new Evolution (3.0.3) also works much better than whatever I had. Not having to kill it 20 times a day is definitely an improvement. Openvpn didn't work out of the box because of SELinux, and by default the firewall blocks mDNS. Strangely port 22 is by default open, even though sshd isn't running by default. Coming from a Debian/Ubuntu world that confused me a little.

In other news, I just bought a PS3 from Amazon and it should be here on Friday.