Bristol Digest, Vol 567, Issue 2

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Today's Topics:

1. Re: Advice on new laptop (John Horne)
2. SMTL Hiring a Linux SysAdmin (Matthew Moore)


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Message: 1
Date: Tue, 09 Sep 2014 21:15:10 +0100
From: John Horne <john.horne@plymouth.ac.uk>
To: bristol@mailman.lug.org.uk
Subject: Re: [bristol] Advice on new laptop
Message-ID: <1410293710.7915.34.camel@localhost>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"

On Tue, 2014-09-09 at 14:42 +0100, john ffitch wrote:
> I have had four laptops, three IBM Thinkpads and one Lenovo Thinkpad
> (this machine). The first and third machines still run and are solid
> (but who wants a IBM 560 with Windows95, no USB, no network, no
> optical drive?; the X42 runs, slowly with occasional disk glitches and
> an odd-format disk; other one belonged to the University and was
> stolen). However this 5yr old X200s is breaking up -- keyboard is
> suspect with sdyl keys at least (*), and middle button is broken. I was
> thinking it might be time to replace.
>
> However the reliability of Lenovo is dubious in my experience, and
> looking at their latest models they have messed up the mouse buttons and
> the keyboard.
>
> So... I have been looking elsewhere. My requirements are
> light
> reasonable disk/mass device (~~250Gb) -- SSD would be nice for battery
> battery life
> Must run Linux, preferably 64bit processor.
> Nibble mouse (I just cannot use the glide pad thing)
>
I bought a Lenovo L440 Thinkpad earlier this year. Although I have used
Toshiba and Samsung's at work, I am quite happy with the Lenovo.

It was expensive, and I basically went for the top of range - 16GB of
memory, HD+(?) screen, centrino wireless, 128GB SSD, Intel i5 (4 core)
CPU etc. I have now replaced the SSD with an Intel 240GB self-encrypting
(FDE) SSD - it works great.

In terms of construction, I have had no problems and it seems to be
reliably built. Replacing the SSD drive was trivial.

It ran Linux (Fedora 20) 64-bit out of the box.

The keyboard does contain a nipple. It works fine in moving the cursor,
but it has no actual 'click' function. You have to use the touchpad for
that.

Cons:
Yes, the ultranav (the glide pad thing) is awkward to use until you get
used to it. Also it took a little setting up. I use KDE for the desktop,
and the settings in there were enough to make the ultrapad usable.
The capslock key has no warning LED when the key has been pushed.
Trivial I know, but I (and many others) really fail to understand why
Lenovo did this. They have LEDs on some of the other keys, so why not on
capslock where it is actually useful! (I got round it by setting up a
KDE notfication.)
Ironically (because I previously really was not interested in this) a
backlit-keyboard might be nice. This model doesn't come with that
option, but I have occasionally found myself working further into
darkness(!) and a backlight would have been nice. The screen brightness
controls work fine.





John.

--
----------------------------------------------------
John Horne Tel: +44 (0)1752 587287
Plymouth University, UK




------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 12:28:42 +0100
From: Matthew Moore <matt@smtl.co.uk>
To: bristol@mailman.lug.org.uk
Subject: [bristol] SMTL Hiring a Linux SysAdmin
Message-ID: <541035EA.4090307@smtl.co.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Hi all,

Hope you don't mind me posting a job up on here, but it might be
interest to some of you:

The Surgical Materials Testing Laboratory in Bridgend has a opening for
a Linux Systems Administrator. The starting pay will be NHS band 5
(which is 21.5k, which rises about 1k per year to 28k). The job has a
good pension and a good holiday allowance. It's a very varied job,
you'll need to be willing to learn new systems and software. Ideally
you'll have the following skill:

Excellent google searching abilities and a willingness to solve problems
on your own.

And then experience with the following (or a willingness to learn):

General linux skills (Ubuntu Linux is the main distro)
KVM & QEMU
NFS & SMB
Basic networking skills (know the difference between Layer 2 and 3)
Python scripting (django knowledge a bonus) and BASH
Postfix, Dovecot, mailman
DNS, DHCP, LDAP & Kerberos
PHP web apps (Joomla, Dokuwiki)
Perl web apps (RT) R Statistics language
LATEX/LyX/Roff

There's also 20 staff on site to provide IT support to. Printers to fix.
Desktops to provision. The infrastructure is pretty stable and fairly
straightforward due to it's small size. It's a nice relaxed place to
work. The work is very varied, you'll never be bored. However you'll
have to be self motivated and happy to work on your own. It's based at
the Princess of Wales Hospital in Bridgend.

If you're just leaving uni or wanting to start off as a Linux SysAdmin,
then this is a good place to work for.

If you're interested, please email me at - matt@smtl.co.uk
<mailto:matt@smtl.co.uk> and I can tell you more or have a chat on the
phone about the job.

NO AGENCIES

Cheers,

Matt

--
Matthew Moore
Linux Systems Administrator
SMTL - Surgical Materials Testing Laboratory
Princess of Wales Hospital
Bridgend
Tel - 01656 752165
Email - matt@smtl.co.uk

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