Ubuntu on Let's Note (Defenestration and Deforestation, part 2)

In part one of this rant, I focused on AC adapter problems and how vendors, being stingy and hyper-competitive, use such problems to get us to buy new when we shouldn't, and how that pushes us to send a lot of potentially useful hardware to landfills and underdeveloped cities and countries where they poison workers and the environment instead of being properly recycled.

(Yeah, yeah, that sentence is too long, and my posts tend to lack that marketable "focus".)

Well, being the fan of libre software that I am, I decided to see how much use I could make of the notebook PC in question, a Let's Note CF-NX2 notebook PC anyway.

I started by installing the Android cellphone developer's kit, Android Studio, from Google. It ran,

but it took ten minutes to start an emulation session with naive settings. RAM might help, and emulating AMD64/i86-64 instead of ARM64 would probably help significantly.

But I'm not going to buy the extra RAM for this notebook until I'm sure I want to keep it, so I don't know how much the extra RAM would help.


(Really, if I want to develop for Android cellphones, I should be running the developer's kit on an ARM64-based PC, not on an old AMD64/i86-64 notebook PC. Yeah, that means doing my homework, because those are hard to find at high-enough specs. Let's not get lost in theories about why they are hard to find.)

So, test 1 -- Results, mixed.

Test 2 -- I installed Ubuntu on an external USB3 240G SSD (JPY 5000 or so).

It runs quite nicely, but it interacts rather inconveniently with the adapter problems.

Yeah, that's the brightness control on the screen, showing an undocumented state. And it often boots up, both in Ubuntu and in MSWindows, with the brightness on the internal screen forced to the bottom limit, with no response to the brightness controls, when the AC adapter is plugged in. You can't do much useful in a screen that dark.

Watching the boot process while playing with the BIOS to try to find a fix to the dark-screen-on-boot problem revealed some interesting facts about the AC adapter:

The intermittent connection in the adapter makes it think the adapter is not the original adapter for this PC.

Yeah, I checked. It is the original.

So the BIOS has some code in it to try to either cause problems for the consumer using a 3rd-party adapter, or try to remit possible issues with such adapters, depending on your point of view. Both points of view have a certain validity.

And that code is quite possibly what is causing the screen to go dark on boot. Or it may be unrelated. But it does seem to be a good place to start if I were to try to prove what I am going to say next:

You would think that plugging in the adapter and getting the charge indicator would have the opposite effect, but computer hardware has odd ways of interacting with problems. So --

If you have a notebook PC that boots up with a dark screen no matter what you do, it's possible that getting a new AC adapter will fix the problem, even if it looks like the adapter is powering/charging the PC.

[JMR201911152111: Update, the replacement adapter works well with Ubuntu and MSWindows -- does not cause screen brightness problems.]

Anyway, aside from the adapter and dark screen issues, Ubuntu runs well on this PC.

The steps are outlined on the Ubuntu forums, the link below shows how from MSWindows, and contains links for doing it from MacOS X or a Linux OS, as well:

https://tutorials.ubuntu.com/tutorial/tutorial-create-a-usb-stick-on-windows#0

So, do I plan on gambling on keeping this machine out of the landfills of some 3rd-world community, or do I send it back and spend about twice the amount on a new ARM-based Chrome OS notebook?

Not sure yet. Still have a couple of days to work out the equations. Very limited budget, both time and money.

I hate being on a budget so limited that I can't do my own small part for the environment.

[JMR201911132000: Fixing the screen controls is in the next part,  Connecting Screen Controls for Video And Audio on Panasonic Let's Note (Defenestration And Deforestation, Part 3), which is moved where this thread probably belongs, to my Defining Computers blog.]

Defenestration And Deforestation

I find myself at something of a confluence of ideas, with a particular mode of thought running through many of my posts to the social web. (If you look at my Basshook timeline, I think you'll notice the common thread.)

There is a company here in Japan that specializes in receiving outdated computers from government institutions and large volume corporate users, wiping their drives, refurbishing them, and turning them over to the consumer market. They advertise themselves as (among other things) JEMTC, Japan Electronic Machine Repair Technology Corporation in English, 一般社団法人　日本電子機器補修協会 (Ippan Shadan Hōjin Nihon Denshi Kiki Hoshū Kyōkai) in Japanese. And one of their claims to fame ("appeal points") is to be helping keep the earth green.

I'll go along with that to a certain extent, particularly in comparison to what happens to most of the hardware we discard. (Yeah, I know that's an old link, and I know a lot of people talk about how things have improved, demonstrating their points with examples of ways things haven't improved. Taking things apart and re-using what you can still leaves a lot of unusable stuff around, often making stuff even less reusable, but that's another rant for another day.)

This company (JEMTC, et. al.) holds one-vendor fairs in public halls around the country, where people interested in obtaining the still useful hardware can look at it, test it out, get a little more educated in how to use it, and maybe buy a machine a little cheaper than what you could get from an electronics/small appliance store.

Well, not really cheaper. The prices aren't all that competitive. The advantage they offer is a level of guarantee that the hardware functions, plus a bit of support for users who need a little hand-holding. (They run a seminar in basics of maintaining a running computer in conjunction with their fairs, a seminar I don't particularly need, but many people do.)

So, I picked up a Panasonic Let's Note CF-NX2 from them for about two times what I could have paid for a same-model unit on Rakuten Ichiba (the Japanese approximate equivalent of ebay). But they've completely cleaned out whatever had been installed and updated the OS to MSWindows 10. They've added their own set of "essential applications" (including the Kingsoft office suite, -- cough). This is definitely stuff which saves me time (other than Kingsoft Office and some other freebies I don't really need because I get the real thing -- Libre software).

This notebook PC is fairly high performance: 2.6 GHz i5, four cores, 4G RAM, 120G boot SSD, which was pretty good specs when it was new some six years ago. Still not bad specs if I were buying new, really, and the CPU has a lot less vulnerable cruft from Intel's excessive optimization efforts in trying to keep an aged and mostly dead CPU architecture relevant. Older tends to be less vulnerable when it comes to Intel CPUs.

I got to try it out before taking it home, and I have some confidence that they'll support me with it.

For some definition of "some confidence" and "support". If I add RAM myself, it voids the warranty. If I even restore the OS myself, it voids the warranty. Definitely, installing Ubuntu and the Android developers tools voids the warranty.

(I bought it planning to void the warranty, after a short check-out period.)

So, I get it home, try it out a bit in MSWindows, congratulate myself that, for a used unit, the battery is holding well, and plug it in to charge it.

No charging pilot, no indication on the little widget in the task bar.

After playing with the AC adapter wires a bit, I see that there is an intermittent open, and I can sometimes get the wire just right so it charges.

So, I call them and ask.

They want me to send both the notebook and the adapter, and they will replace it with an equivalent unit. Won't be the same model.

Whoa. Brakes on. Defenestrated. Every reason I spent extra money on this machine just went out the window.

[JMR201911152050: Semi-correction. When I called two days ago to get approval to send it back, I got a different operator. Before I hung up, I mentioned that I would be happy to get a replacement AC adapter, if they hadn't already told me they wouldn't do that. This operator said he'd check, and called me back to tell me they could do that after all. Had some adapters in stock. And they'd give me a few extra days to give the new adapter a good workout. It came this morning, and, so far, so good. 

This is more like the kind of support I was hoping for. I may be keeping this box after all.]

I suppose I could sink another JPY 10,000 into a new AC adapter from Panasonic. Or I might be able to get a compatible adapter for maybe half that. Shoot, I could fix the wire myself -- splice the break out and void the warranty.

Or I could give it back now and get my money back and get a Macbook or something else, instead.

And what would they do with it?

Are they going to buy an adapter and put it back out in their next fair with a brand new adapter? If so, why wouldn't they be willing to just replace my bad adapter? (And send the bad one to some unnamed underdeveloped city where some poor soul working for something like a dollar a day exposes herself to poisonous chemicals to strip out the metals and leaves the plastics out to poison her family's environment, see link above.)

Or are they going to dump the whole computer, just because the adapter is bad and it will cost them too much in paperwork, skilled labor, and parts, to make a profit on the final sale? (And then there is even more poison sent to said underdeveloped city in southeast Asia.)

Where is Radio Shack now that we need them? Oh, I know, rose-colored glasses.

But it is precisely the lack of a store where I could go for parts and friendly discussion (of more value for encouragement and entertainment than for technical expertise) that forces us to send our cast-off poisons to said underdeveloped city in southeast Asia.

Parts, well, yeah. I can, with some effort, find parts on-line, and there are even concrete-and-iron-frame stores in Osaka, about a 500 to 1000 yen ride into Osaka from here. But nothing like running down to the neighborhood Radio Shack for parts and a little chat was.

There is value in chatting with the people we do business with.

Before we need carbon sequestoring, we need Intel to quit dumping their intellectual wasteproduct on the market, to quit forcing us into the never-ending upgrade-that-isn't cycle that spews poisons out into the undeserving 3rd world.

We need Intel and several dozen other large companies like them to quit their wars to take over their markets. World domination is so last millennium, so passé.

(And we need to take, not send, jobs that aren't harmful to the 3rd world communities instead of the poison we are sending them, but that's a rant for another day.)

And we need more businesses where we can go to get encouragement when we want to recycle our stuff ourselves.

[Update (JMR201911121208): I've spent some time over the weekend with this machine, trying to get an idea whether I should gamble on it by fixing the AC adapter myself. So I'll bore you in part 2 with a few problems I found.]

[JMR201911132000: Part three,  Connecting Screen Controls And Audio on Panasonic Let's Note (Defenestration And Deforestation, Part 3), moved where this thread probably belongs, to my Defining Computers blog.]