IT Infrastructure and Software Development from the Customer's Perspective
| Out of the box, the external monitor key (Fn-F7) on my Lenovo X300 didn’t work. I found a great post on the ThinkWiki that described how to do it. I followed the instructions up to and including the “set permissions and restart acpi” section. |
There was one small problem with the bash script that you put in /usr/local/sbin/thinkpad-fn-f7. Lines 39 and 40 didn’t get the right values when one of the monitors was off, but still connected. I changed them to:
INTERNAL\_STATE=$($SU xrandr | sed -n "s/$\{INTERNAL\_OUTPUT}\\Wconnected\\W(\[0-9\]+\[xX\]\[0-9\]++\[0-9\]++\[0-9\]+).\*/\\1/p")
EXTERNAL\_STATE=$($SU xrandr | sed -n "s/$\{EXTERNAL\_OUTPUT}\\Wconnected\\W(\[0-9\]+\[xX\]\[0-9\]++\[0-9\]++\[0-9\]+).\*/\\1/p")
and all was good.
| I posted my experience to the ThinkWiki discussion on the topic, so hopefully by the time you read this the fix will have been made there. |
| I upgraded my laptop (Lenovo x300) to Ubuntu 8.10 a few weeks ago. The rumour was that power management was better, and I was longing for a kernel that handled the sound on the x300 without a re-compile of the driver every time I updated the kernel. |
The upgrade went smoothly, although it took a very long time. The default Ubuntu mirror for Canada seems to be very slow these days. (I’ve since switched to http://gpl.savoirfairelinux.net/pub/mirrors/ubuntu. It seems a lot faster.)
Two things I’ve had to work on. First, suspend and resume screws up the wireless until you add a line to /etc/pm/config.d/00sleep_module. First, you have to figure out which driver you’re using for wireless. Do
<blockquote style="font-family: courier new;">lshw | more
</blockquote>Look for the line that says “wireless” by typing “/wireless” to the more prompt. Then look for the next line with “driver” in it. In my case it says “driver=iwlagn”. So now edit the file and add the required line:
<blockquote style="font-family: courier new;">sudo gedit /etc/pm/config.d/00sleep_module
</blockquote>Add the following at the very end:
<blockquote style="font-family: courier new;">SUSPEND_MODULES=”iwlagn”
</blockquote>The other problem was more mysterious. CBC Radio’s website wouldn’t play after upgrading to 8.10. It had worked for my in 8.04 after some fooling around, but I couldn’t get it to work. I had given up after wasting almost a whole day on the problem. After a few software upgrades, it started to work. For the record, I’m using gnome-mplayer to play Windows Media Player material. |
The machines we’re using to package the medications are the FastPak EXP from Automed (AmerisourceBergen). They have an awesome pre-installation support team. The front-end sales people were so-so – your mileage will vary, of course, depending on the region. The sales team was Western Canada; the pre-installation support is for all of Canada.
The machines themselves have a number of quirks. Nothing that can’t be worked around, but don’t believe that you won’t have to make any decisions yourself. Also, since we’re running three machines, we’ve written our own little database scripts to keep the data in the machines synchronized. There’s no way you should try to do it by hand, although I suspect that’s what most people do because the vendor doesn’t have anything to help.
The main competition to Automed are the Pacmed machines from McKesson. There are some differences between the two that will require a change to your extract or interface from whatever Pharmacy Information System you’re using. Nothing big, but in software even a small thing can cost a lot of money. It’s worth looking into the interface in detail if you’re looking at switching from Pacmed or running both in parallel.
Because we’re packaging all regularly scheduled oral solids (with some exceptions) we’ve found that our Pharmacy Information System wasn’t really set up to handle some of the scenarios. Our distribution model seems to be different from the typical hospital pharmacy, but I don’t have enough experience with hospital pharmacies to say if these challenges would generalize to other installations.
I have an old (?) Dell Axim X30 PDA that I use mainly as an address book and MP3 player (I added a memory card so I can listen to podcasts while walking the dog). Now that Ubuntu is my primary desktop OS, I wanted to be synching contacts and sound files with Ubuntu.
The SynCE project has done this. The documentation is pretty good, but as usual I managed to make it hard for myself. Here’s what I did:
The last line should show what’s in the top-level directory of the X30.
Note that I was already running kernel 2.6.24-19, so I didn’t have to rebuild the modules as described in the documentation. If your Ubuntu 8.04 is up-to-date, you’ll be running at least this kernel.
My problem: All the installation instructions warn you to blacklist the ipaq module if you have connection problems. So I went ahead and blacklisted it before I even started. Then I fumbled around for a few hours trying to connect unsuccessfully and searching for information.
The X30 only supports Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition. I don’t know all the technical details, but I know it means it used a somewhat different protocol for connecting. In my search for answers, I found enough examples of people successfully connecting to X30s that I kept going. I also found enough references to the “old protocol” or “serial protocol” that I finally realized I should try allowing the ipaq module. I removed the blacklist and, presto, it worked.