Mike Pelley's Musings

It has been some time (again) since I posted and I have a few things to write about. Until then… I saw at the end of a Chuck Lorre show:

Chuck Lorre Productions, #401
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
— Mark Twain

“Do you believe this $#*!?”
— Chuck Lorre

It is moonshine!

Moonshine – August 29

I realized on Friday that the Lenovo Energy Manager on my Y50 was no longer working.

First, some words of clarification: I spend a few hours with my dear friend Google trying to find out haw to fix “battery saver.”  (Well, actually I was watching the Back to the Future trilogy on AMC, but I digress.)

Battery saver to me is how you keep the lifespan and capacity of your laptop’s batter in as good shape as possible. You know, not keeping the battery charged to 100% and overheating when plugged in.

I learned two things about this: (1) “Battery Saver” does not mean how to keep your laptop’s battery in good shape – it is how to keep you laptop going as long as possible and (2) I have no idea what others call my version of battery saver.

Anyway, after going through countless search results I found someone (and I cannot remember who to give credit, unfortunately) defined battery saver the same as I do.

The solution: Uninstall Lenovo’s Energy Manager and reinstall it! Simple, what?

Again:

If you upgrade a Lenovo Y50 from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 you likely will need to uninstall Lenovo Energy Manager and reinstall it to have  “Conservation Mode” (which is what Lenovo calls my version of “battery saver”) actually work.

This might be the “new normal” with UEFI BIOSes but when I updated the BIOS of my IdeaPad Y50 the GRUB2 boot manager was gone and replaced by Windows 10’s boot loader.

Even the upgrade from Windows 8.1 to 10 didn’t mess with GRUB. (Kudo’s Microsoft – Credit where credit is due!)

Don’t have a cow, man!

It was, of course fixed by booting to Linux Mint 17.2 LiveCD. Unfortunately, I still cannot get the “normal” GRUB fix to work. You know:

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
sudo chroot /mnt
sudo update-grub2

Which gives the error:

/usr/sbin/grub-probe:error:failed to get canonical path of /cow.

Much Googling… Many hits on “I have the same problem…”

The easy fix? Use Boot-Repair. It isn’t included in the LiveCD so you have to download it with:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && boot-repair

I ended up having to clean up GRUB – how many different entries CAN it find? All of them, apparently. But, this is better than having to do a re-install….

By now two of four of the other Windows 7 machines that are turned on have not yet gotten the update for Windows 10. Yesterday I manually updated my main machine (Lenovo Y50) by going to Microsoft and downloading the upgrade tool. I was too impatient to wait for Windows Update to do its thing.  The upgrade tool is available in Windows 10 32-bit Upgrade and Windows 10 64-bit Upgrade versions. You can also download the Windows 10 ISO.

Of course, you need to have a valid copy of Windows 🙂

As I started to say, two of the four as the old HP G62 (a Intel Pentium Dual-Core T4200 – you know, the Penryn generation Core 2 Duo that they renamed) has received its “reservation.” That upgrade has started.

I finally got a chance to more fully try out Diablo III and Ghost Recon: Future Soldier.

Future Soldier worked just fine – I couldn’t see any difference between running it under Windows 8.0/8.1 and 10.

Diablo III also worked fine with one strange anomaly – If I use the Windows key to jump out of the game I can’t get back into the game. Well, sort of. I can get back into the game but I keep seeing the desktop. Weird.

Once I get the old HP upgraded I’ll post what Windows 10 works like on some lesser hardware…

I just finished upgrading my Lenovo Y50-70 install from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10. Of course, I run Linux Mint 17.2 as my primary OS but need Windows for VMware ESXi administration and, of course, running some games. Diablo III and Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier are my current favourites.

Anyway, unlike other  Windows upgrades this one did NOT blow away GRUB! Of course, I had to keep an eye on things as the upgrade was underway – multiple reboots – which would have left me booting into Mint – making the upgrade even longer. They weren’t kidding when they said multiple reboots and it would take a while.

I still have to see if everything is working – so far WiFi, Ethernet Sound, nVidia drivers, touchpad, etc. all seem fine. Still need to see if Diablo and Ghost Recon work, though…

I also found out that my VMware Workstation installation worked just fine as well after the upgrade as well!

Not bad, Microsoft!

For the longest time I have been looking for the correct way to use my Lenovo Y50’s hotkey (Fn + F6) to disable my touchpad. I hate the when I’m typing and my cursor decides to jump somewhere…

I found scripts to disable the Synaptic touchpad but this isn’t what I really wanted. They worked but still…

Anyway, after yet another Google search I found the answer! The solution is located my Linux Mint Post Lenovo Y50 – Turn off Touchpad and the answer by ecola:

Here is the Answer:

gksu pluma /lib/udev/hwdb.d/60-keyboard.hwdb

Add this at the end of the Lenovo section:

# Lenovo 20378
keyboard:dmi:bvn*:bvr*:svnLENOVO*:pn*20378*:pvr*
 KEYBOARD_KEY_f3=f21 # Fn+F6 (toggle touchpad)

Save the file, then:

sudo udevadm hwdb --update

sudo reboot

Works just perfect! Thanks ecola!

Like most people with a smart phone I take many photos. Maybe like other people I forget about these pictures shortly after they are taken. Here is one that I found from Paris, June 2014.

My son, Cameron, just did his second Shave for the Brave. Donations can still be made here.

And this was the process…

Before…

…during…

…and after

Well done, son! I am so proud of you!