Yesterday evening, I took a little time away from my normal activities to play with technology. I have an old IBM ThinkPad model R51. It had come with Windows XP, and somewhere along the way, XP stopped working. The laptop has sat unused for quite a while. However, I had recently been upgrading one of my servers to a later version of Ubuntu Linux and I thought it would be fun to see if I could resuscitate the old laptop to run smoothly with Linux.

I downloaded the ISO format of the Ubuntu 9.04 installation CD, through it in the laptop and booted up. It was a quick and easy installation and just about everything seemed to work smoothly. It found my Wifi and connected without difficulty. I connected my old cellphone, a Motorola Razr V3xx and it mounted the file system without a problem. I changed the connection options on the Razr and it recognized the Razr as a cellular modem and gave me the option to connect to the Internet. Likewise, it recognized the old Canon PowerShot SD1000 camera and assorted memory sticks that I had kicking around.

It has played audio and video fine, although it has had to go out and download multimedia plugins and has complained that the MPEG-4 AAC decoder is from the 'BAD' set.

Right now, I'm using Firefox on the Ubuntu laptop along with OpenOffice for my word processing.

The Ubuntu 9.04 desktop installation CD also comes with Ekiga, a SIP based Voice over IP application. I've installed Ekiga and did an initial test. The site talks about connecting with other SIP systems and I'm thinking about how it fits into Asterisk, an open source PBX which I have on my server. I also noted that they have attempted to connect with Yale's SIP server, but had difficulties. I'm also curious about how this might connect with an OpenMoko device. For that matter, I'm curious about the interaction between OpenMoko, Asterisk, GTalk2Voip, Ekiga, and perhaps even Google Voice. I've read that people have had some success connecting Google Voice to SIP phones, so this is promising. I do need to configure my SIP phone to get outside the firewall and I'm interested in seeing what can be done with SIP and IPv6.

The problems I've run into is that I can't get Bluetooth to work properly, the internal mic does not seem to be working and I haven't been able to play DVDs yet. I get a message say "Could not read from resource".

On the other hand, it seems to run much better than my newer laptop that has Vista. The Vista laptop every now and then switches into some mode where it is pegged by the system processes and is virtually unusable.

In other geek stuff, I've finally set up an account at CoverItLive. Today, Fiona will be going to a horse show, and I'll try to cover it live, tweeting from my phone. My CoverItLive page is set up to pull in my tweets, as well as any tweets with a #ctgymkhana hash tag:

That's it for this morning's geeking. And remember, tune into Fiona's Radio Show this evening.