Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex on my Thinkpad T42 Ticks me off
My laptop has been running Intrepid Ibex, the latest version of Ubuntu for a little while now. I’m getting a little frustrated. It could possibly be that the laptop is degrading, but I think not. I had pretty good battery life and great USB support before, and my webcam worked in skype. All was well.
Now I can only use USB sticks if I plug them into an external hub. The internal won’t recognize the stick and mount it as a FAT file system. My webcam is USB, and it doesn’t work at all even in the programs where it used to work just fine in Hardy Heron (the prior release: they’re alphabetical now).
The battery life is poor. Powertop says it’s because the internal USB is busy 100% of the time. It might be a usb controller failure on my laptop, but I have doubts. I guess I should restart the laptop on a different OS (maybe CD or flash stick) and see if it behaves differently.
I moan and wail about Ubuntu’s problems with USB. Then I finally look at /etc/fstab. Guess what? I have an entry for /dev/sdb1 — the USB drive — in my mount table. Isn’t that odd? I remove that line, and suddenly the USB stick works just fine. Hmmm.
Still no camera, and the USB reports 100% activity via powertop. I think that there is something wrong either in the OS or the hardware, but it will take a little more investigation to figure that out. Can’t beat on the OS vendor when it’s operator error or hardware failures.
Jury is out.
T40-T42 thinkpads a notorious for getting usb problems after a few years. just search for the term “flexing” in thinkpad forums.
Comment by cygn — 2009-April-8 @ 11:12
Hi, Tim.
We need closure on this story! Have the jury reached a decision yet?
Comment by Interested. — 2009-April-16 @ 03:05