I bought a Runcore 32GB 1.8″ ZIF SSD from Solid State Central for $159 and waited a long and painful 14 days for it to arrive (out of stock, had to come in from overseas).

When it arrived, I obviously tore the box apart like a kid at christmastime.

Anyway, a few words on the package itself… it comes with a handy external caddy for mounting 1.8″ ZIF drives, as well as coming with a curious USB cable that plugs straight into the SSD itself using some sort of proprietary port up the other end of the drive…. strange.

Now the bit that REALLY got me was the connector… ripping the Vaio apart is a piece of cake in itself, but one thing that needs to be noted is that the ZIF connector on the original drive IS INVERTED… so if you’re looking at the original drive with the ZIF connector facing up, the conductors are on the bottom edge of the socket. On the SSD, they’re on the top edge, despite the fact the connector looks extremely similar and is in exactly the same position. EDIT: Apparently some drives ship with the ZIF connector in the correct position… so look out for this (Thanks Lars).

This wasn’t really a huge issue, except that a) it took me hours to figure it out while I scoured forums for evidence that the drive was actually incompatible, and b) once I had the damn thing in, the Vaio’s ZIF cable is a little bit squeezed in by the new arrangement, as the hard drive has to be installed essentially flipped over from the original spec.

The whole thing went back together just fine though, and the install etc ran smoothly… and damn this thing boots up fast. Easily as fast as my desktop, which is good considering we’re talking about a 1.3ghz Intel Atom vs a Q6600 Core2 Quad.

Obviously this is due to the awesome seek times of SSDs… the actual throughput of the drive is obviously improved but its the seek time that accounts for the awesome boot times. With no moving parts, SSDs will always outpace mechanical drives in that regard.

So if you’re ready to drop $950 on a Vaio P and want a relatively cheap performance boost… GET AN SSD. I went with the cheaper 32GB because I didn’t really need the space… I have an external bus-powerd 120GB drive for that… but the SSD is well worth the money, and you might even get a bit longer battery life out of the P as well.

I promptly wiped the lot and put on Ubuntu but then ran into the issue of hardware support… turns out the graphics chipset used in this little beast (Intel GMA500) is actually a weird mutation of a PowerVR chipset with some 2D/mpeg acceleration thrown on top. And until recently, the driver support under Linux for this chipset (moniker “Poulsbo”) was horrific…. the best you could ask for was either running under VESA or fbdev, and *maybe* getting the nice 1600×768 resolution (and weird aspect ratio that goes with it) but it was dog slow. Others had success using the “psb” driver, but only under 2D.

Today, I’m going to show you how to run it with full 3D support and composite/desktop effects under Ubuntu.

First obviously, you need to install the damn thing… seeing as the P doesn’t have an optical drive, you either need to use uNetBootin to create a bootable flash drive, or do what I did, get lazy and use an external USB optical drive.

Success. I went with XFS for the root filesystem simply because the benchmarks showed it outperforms both Ext3 and Ext4, and considering the P comes with a 4200rpm IDE drive (running in UDMA5, or 100MB/sec) I wanted the best filesystem performance possible… yes, I could have partitioned judiciously to keep seek times down etc etc but honestly… I couldn’t be bothered. I have a 32GB solid state drive in the mail, and that’ll take care of seek times.

Everything runs perfectly with the install, and there are no freaky drivers needed for any devices except the graphics card. You should end up booting into Ubuntu, but the screen res will be lower (it still has the right aspect ratio however, so it won’t look squished).

Now…. fire up Synaptic (System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager) and go to Settings -> Software Sources. Under the “Third-Party Software” tab you need to add these two repositories:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mobile/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mobile/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Thanks to Brian White for this step as it negates the need to copy/paste keys around the place…. drop to a terminal,  then do the following:

gpg –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv C6598A30
gpg –export –armor C6598A30 | sudo apt-key add -

Back to Synaptic! Click “reload” and it should go off and fetch a whole bunch of new package info. When it’s done, type “poulsbo-driver” into the quicksearch field. From the narrowed down list, select poulsbo-driver-2d, poulsbo-driver-3d, and I *think* it should be already selected as a dependency, but also select psb-kernel-headers, psb-firmware, psb-kernel-source and xserver-xorg-video-psb. I’m uncertain here because I went a slightly roundabout way to get to this point, but still had success.

Click “Apply”.

Open up Terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and edit (using vi, nano, whatever editor you like) /boot/grub/menu.lst.

You should find a line that looks like this (your root UUID and kernel version will/may vary)

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-13-generic root=UUID=c34d1d57-59d3-4f6f-abc1-fd83aea4 ro quiet splash

Change it to this (bold is to emphasise what needs changing)

kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-13-generic root=UUID=c34d1d57-59d3-4f6f-abc1-fd83aea4 ro quiet nosplash mem=1500mb

This tells grub to force the kernel to recognise only 1500mb of the installed 2GB, leaving 500mb free for the graphics adapter to use. The “nosplash” option prevents any sexy graphics being displayed during boot. I’m not sure if this is *essential* but it was in another write-up that I followed. I may try removing it to see what happens.

Also, edit /usr/bin/compiz and around line 62 you should see something like this:

WHITELIST=”nvidia intel ati radeon i810 fglrx”

Change it to this:

WHITELIST=”psb nvidia intel ati radeon i810 fglrx”

This is so compiz will *actually start* and not just die because it feels like it.

Save that file, and reboot… if all has gone well, you should see GDM firing up in hi-res goodness. If not and you get some message whinging about video settings… click Ctrl+Alt+1, login with your usual creds, type “sudo bash” to get root access (password is the same as your user password) and type “/etc/init.d/gdm stop” to kill GDM, then “modprobe psb”. If the psb module wasn’t loaded before, you will see the difference… the screen res on the console will suddenly go native and the text will be *tiny*. Then just type “gdm” to get gdm to start up again.

If you’re back in, and things look good, and the res is nice and sharp, log in, click System -> Preferences -> Appearance and click the Visual Effects tab. I chose “Normal” just to get things started… if it goes well you should get a message like “Do you want to keep these settings” etc… say yes! If any windows you had open appear to have lost their borders, don’t fret… just close whatever app it was and reopen and everything should be fine.

I also installed compizconfig-settings-manager to fine tune the compiz setup… so I get the rotating desktop etc, and it all looks really nice. All in all, it performs really well on what is a sub-$1000 netbook that uses about 6 watts of power under normal load, so I’m really impressed.

Some things that worked for me out of the box were wifi (with WPA) and my 3G USB modem… plugged it in, selected a carrier, and it worked straight away. I think the guys at Ubuntu have really gotten their act together making this a polished OS… if the only thing needed is a bit of tinkering/tweaking to get a new, poorly supported graphics chipset working… that’s pretty good. It performs better under Ubuntu than it did under Vista.

Power protection. This is simply a MUST. There is no excuse for second-rate hardware, as a failure here has the potential to do a lot of damage, most importantly to things you DON’T skimp on, or even worse, your data.

A decent business-grade-or-better UPS is a must, and if you can’t verify it’s good for at least a thousand-amp surge, get a surge protector that is. I have one plugged into the wall near my feet that cost me $30, and has a $25,000 connected equipment warranty. From memory, it’s good for about 1,300 amps of current.

Whichever UPS you choose, it is essential that it has the capability to connect to your hardware via RS-232 or USB, so that your equipment can get the notifications it needs to start a clean shutdown. A 30-minute battery life is utterly useless during a 35-minute power failure, if all that happens when the batteries run dry is that the equipment goes down hard anyway!

If you can cover every piece of computing equipment in the office, so nobody goes down in sheets of flame when the power goes out, even better. Expensive, but in my opinion, downtime is even more so.

Decent networking gear. A little desktop 8-port switch running all your crucial bits isn’t really that much of an unsafe bet, but if it fails (and a fair percentage do, even if it’s never happened to you) you’re left with nothing tying your network together, and a bunch of workers twiddling their thumbs while you feverishly run off to Harris Tech to buy a new switch.

Get something reasonable. Doesn’t have to be a monstrous 48-port managed beast from Cisco with fiber connections etc, but get something rackmountable, 24 ports to allow for future expansion, and a decent brand…. I’m looking an unmanaged solution from Cisco square in the eyes here, but if it’s beyond your price range, go for something like Asus or D-Link.

On the topic of networking gear, a business-grade ADSL modem (assuming you have ADSL) is absolutely crucial. Again, see the point about failure: workers twiddling their thumbs while you hike to the nearest computer shop for a new modem. Consumer-grade modems often have problems dealing with a “larger” (5 or more people, certainly not large) internal network, as NAT tables etc tend to get overrun, and they will simply fall over and twitch/sputter/whimper if you happen to get (D)DoS’d. I’ve recently stumbled upon Draytek as a pretty good brand (although it got fried thanks to point #1 not being observed previously), but Cisco would be the definite preference…. again, if it’s out of your price range, Draytek is a sure bet.

Don’t even think about bringing in something you pulled off the shelf at your local computer store for $99.

Redundancy. $1,000 for your entire server infrastructure might look like awesome savings on paper, but you won’t be thinking that when a month’s worth of data goes down the tube because a hard drive dies. Think about how long it took X number of people to do all that work, and how much it cost to pay them…. weigh that up against paying a few thousand extra for a business-grade server with redundant storage, along with a backup option (tape preferably). It’s an easy choice, really…. pay $5,000 now for a business-grade server stacked inside a rack cabinet with a business-grade UPS, and a RAID solution. RAID5 is my personal favourite, as alongside the data protection, you get downtime protection too… if a drive dies, the lights stay on and you just replace the drive. It’ll crunch for a few hours rebuilding the array, but no-one else in the office going about their daily duties needs to be any the wiser…. and that’s exactly the way it should be. Hardware RAID5 is better….. don’t put your data’s fate in the hands of a generic software-based solution.

Guys who know their stuff. I’ve heard of too many places that get a “consultant” in for a few days to build them a server and then bugger off and leave it to its own devices. If your company or business model doesn’t warrant in-house IT talent, think seriously about hosting everything (email, web etc) offsite and then striking up a good relationship with an IT consultant who’ll work by the hour, and have a support contract in place…… you might not need him/her for 6 months, but when you do, he/she is an hour or so away and can get you back up and running ASAP. And you’ll have a nice fileserver running onsite with the peace of mind in knowing that it can get fixed same-day by your IT consultant of choice.

If you are the sort of business who needs IT talent, then make sure you match up your infrastructure with their skillsets….. it can be tricky, but find yourself a jack-of-all-trades who’s savvy with all aspects of your infrastructure, whether you’re a Linux-based or Windows-based shop. Make sure they’ve got the right equipment, and that they’re happy to kick in a few outside hours (weekends, nights etc) to keep things running or to fix things when needed. A 9-5 clock-puncher who disappears off the face of the earth between 5pm and 9am isn’t going to fix a 24/7 system when it goes down out of hours. Get some sort of monitoring set up so that they get that irritating SMS at 4 in the morning telling them that something is broken. If they’re good at what they do and take their job seriously, they’ll haul their butts out of bed and fix it.

Equipment for everyone. You don’t need to buy a $4,000 gaming rig for the guy who works at spreadsheets all day or writes content…. but make sure the equipment you do buy is good quality. Spend a little extra cash on good quality monitors, slightly-better-than-average componentry and a comfy, ergonomic chairs, keyboards and mice. You’re not trying to run a sweatshop and boiler room, so treat your staff with respect and make sure they enjoy using the equipment that makes the business earn money! More importantly, you don’t want a graveyard of broken-down computers and computer parts filling up the server room.

So!

That was a (by no means exhaustive) list of some of the things you’ll be looking at purchasing/providing when setting up or expanding your business, and in my opinion, they are things that should not be skimped on. If you look at that list and think “well, chairs, servers, computers… what else IS there??” that’s kind of the point….. it’s all the equipment that makes your business function (and keeps your staff comfortable), and essentially is what brings money into the business…. ergo it’s entirely justifiable to spend a bit of extra cash making sure you get the goods. And not the junk.

NEVER AGAIN.

I don’t know what I was thinking the day I handed over my hard earned cash (well, signed a 24-month contract to slowly and painfully hand over my hard earned cash over 2 years) for a phone which was overpriced and very, very, very disappointing.

ActiveSync just didn’t work properly. The phone was slow. It recorded weird contacts. It has no functionality to MOVE contacts from SIM to phone or vice versa. It won’t sync with Apple’s iSync because apparently Windows Mobile is different to normal mobile devices. Sometimes it’d record a phonecall to an arbitrary 1300 number as a call to someone in my address book (even though the two numbers bore no further resemblance than a single digit). The microphone would randomly cut out but the problem has mysteriously disappeared.

In a nutshell, this device doesn’t even come close to justifying its massive price tag. I’m selling it and getting an iPhone. Yes, having an iPhone means I’m tethered to iTunes/iSync, but I’d rather that and be able to use it on ANY computer with iTunes than use a sub-standard piece of phone software that, quite frankly, gives me an ulcer just looking at it.

As far as the hardware is concerned… they’re just a mid-to-high-end Intel-based notebook. It’s the software that makes these things truly sing (and of course the utterly beautiful design of the thing itself).

Short of doing a free review for Apple, I’ll just say that anyone intent on getting the most out of their computer and wanting to experience what it really means to “use” a computer, you’d be doing yourself an injustice if you DIDN’T buy a Mac. To quote Steve Jobs…. “everything just works”.

I simply despise Windows, and not just because Microsoft is, in my opinion, a monopolistic behemoth bent on world domination. There’s something about Windows (all the way from 3.11 to Vista) that screams “we are trying too hard to make it look really cool”. That and it is sloppy, unstable and insecure. In fact as far as I’m concerned, the only thing it is any good for is playing games, and even that is starting to fade into irrelevance in the face of the latest consoles to hit the market.

I also tried Linux for a spell. If you’re a seasoned Windows-basher like me and your budget can’t quite stretch to buying a Mac, Ubuntu Linux makes a great alternative, and for a power user like myself who routinely gets his hands right under the hood (read: uses console a lot) it makes a great development platform. I STILL keep two machines running at home and one at work, all running Debian, for my web development escapades. Add my VPS from NetLogistics to the mix, and I have four Debian boxes at my disposal at any given moment. For a serious web developer, using Linux or FreeBSD isn’t an option…. it’s a necessity.

And please don’t talk to me about XYZ.Net (ASP, C#, J#, whatever). The entire concept of a mission-critical application running on a machine that has its wheels turned by a piece of software the owner of the hardware doesn’t actually OWN, and has no fundamental control over, simply gives me the creeps. .Net has been a somewhat unfunny joke since Day 1 and I don’t think that’s likely to change. I honestly feel that .Net is still alive simply because of the amount of spineless middle-managers throughout the world who chose to go the MS path simply because it was a “safe bet” as far as their jobs were concerned – Nobody Ever Got Fired For Choosing Microsoft.

Microsoft (and in particular Steve Ballmer) need to face the facts*…. nobody likes them. Nobody wants them to partner with Yahoo! and become a major media player. Nobody wants them to cut the price on all their software to $1.00 a piece for a few choice 3rd world clients in a bid to establish a foothold in growing economies (why pay $1 a piece for software when you can get Linux/FreeBSD for free). Nobody cares whether or not they think they are the best. The simple fact is, people’s eyes are opening (albeit slowly) and they’re scanning around for alternatives, and finding them. Couple Apple’s slowly dropping prices with an ever-improving offering from Ubuntu (and other desktop-oriented distros), and you get a rich set of alternatives, without being too diverse as too blur existing standards and turn the whole desktop market into a muddy, incoherent mess.

* “Facts” as in “what people like me perceive to be likely” facts, not “Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury” facts.

I’d like to take this opportunity to state that the above post is my opinion only, and not to be taken as verifiable fact or a suggestion thereof.