Difference between revisions of "Talk:ThinkWiki"

Revision as of 16:01, 13 September 2008

NOTE!

This is not a user support forum about general ThinkPad questions, please do not abuse the Wiki by posting such questions here!

There are at least two different forms of date notation used on the main page. One way should be picked. I would suggest ISO standard YYYY-MM-DD http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-time.html -David Mattli

The main page of ThinkWiki is not protected, so feel free to edit it. But do it with caution - it's the primary connection to the all content of our ThinkWiki ;-)

--akw 00:11, 25 Sep 2004 (CEST)

I added to wikipedia-like templates. To edit them go to Template:ThinkWiki_Preamble and Template:ThinkWiki_News. Shall we put the other parts of the page in templates, too? If we do so, we could have that nice block design from wikipedia on our mainpage.

--akw 11:37, 25 Sep 2004 (CEST)

I think this is too much color. Makes it less readable, takes longer to orientate than the plain list style layout.

Liked it with only the two blocks in the beginning.

If we want to use blocks for everything, please stick to fewer colors. I think the yellow of the first block is not bad, and else i'd suggest light grey, maybe light blue.

However, if we stick to having all in blocks, how about this color scheme?

Wyrfel 16:35, 25 Sep 2004 (CEST)

Made another Mainpage layout sketch. This tries to resemble the Tux and IBM logo colors and therefor looks quite "fresh".

Wyrfel 18:59, 25 Sep 2004 (CEST)

Too colorful for my taste, I think the other one is better --Nomeata 19:46, 28 Sep 2004 (CEST)

Important change: Moved Main_Page to ThinkWiki for cosmetical reasons..

--akw 16:54, 26 Sep 2004 (CEST)

Needed: older ThinkPad specs...

As you can tell by my userid here, I've got a 600E. There are a whole lot of them out there thanks to the fact it was the current model during the Dot-Com era. We should cover the older ThinkPads and their quirks as well as the later models.

I also had a 365X, which is now living with a friend in the UK.

Yes, the next ThinkPad I'll probably score is a T4x, they are really kewl machines and inspire technolust in this geek. But until then, I love my 600E and I'm looking forward to some upgrades this weekend.

I will make copious notes on the upgrade process, which will include the installation of a 40GB hard drive and using the stock 10GB drive as extra Windows storage space. I have a hard drive bay module so the stock drive can be reused. The vast majority of the HD will be given over to an install of Debian Linux, with a 7GB Windows 2K partition because the University I will be attending a year from now demands it. (Yeah, I know, sucks, doesn't it.)

ThinkPad different, Michelle

I totally agree.

All specs of all models can be found on the IBM support pages, we just need volunteers to transfer the infos into internal pages.

Since this is not the most interesting thing to do and hence it would be best if people using older ThinkPads transfer the specs for their models themselves. The same goes for other articles as installation infos, problems or whatever. I had a 570 once and loved it even though T30s where available at the same time...and i'd like to see more about these machines here, which everyone of them had some special characteristics and ideas behind them. So please show up, proud owners of Thinkpad 730TEs. 701s, 360Ps, Transnotes etc. ... ! ;)

Owners of the newer machines should take care of writing their articles (especially when creating new pages or sections) in a way that they are open for older models as well...i.e. make clear in the page or section title that its a specific topic for newer models.

Thanks, Wyrfel 00:45, 29 Sep 2004 (CEST)

I just inserted Benchmarks into the main menu.

--akw 14:07, 15 Oct 2004 (CEST)

I replaced the old logo with the great new one crafted by Wyrfel

--akw 14:22, 1 Mar 2005 (CET)

The new logo is too large to fit the sidebar. I can only see the yellow center with the ThinkWiki text and the left foot of Tux. I am using 1024x768 resolution and Opera. --137.226.40.2 14:37, 1 Mar 2005 (CET)

In Firefox the rest of the logo appears overlaid over the page frame. Interesting, that Opera doesn't do this.

However, we'll fix this soon.

Wyrfel 19:57, 1 Mar 2005 (CET)

Well, I am using Firefox and I only see half of Tux without any overlay. I guess I'll wait for the fix :-) --80.146.81.192 21:33, 1 Mar 2005 (CET)

Strange, it works with firefox and epiphany for me. I'll fix it.

Ok, now the smaller logo image is online. Looks nice for me :-)

--akw 22:15, 1 Mar 2005 (CET)

Main Page now protected

I had to protect the mainpage from editing because of vandalism. Everyone who wants to add something to the mainpage is asked to post it here, the admins (akw, Wyrfel) will insert it into the mainpage. You can also contact us to make your suggestions!

We're sorry for inconvenience. :-(

--akw 10:20, 2 Mar 2005 (CET)

Can I start a thread on DVD playback for the X60, please? I can play back DVDs using SUSE 10.3, however any fast action parts are blurred. I do not know if this is a limitation of the graphics, or monitor hardware, or something else. Thanks

Updates todo

MediaWiki Update

I updated the thinkwiki software to version mediawiki 1.4.4. I hope this update will not be too painful. There is still a problem with URL rewriting, so I had to deactivate the .htaccess file. Because of this, we got this ugly URLS with this index.php before the entry. The problem seems to be with the wiki config file LocalSettings.php and/or the .htaccess file. I hope I get it fixed soon.

Spelling: HOWTOs

Could anyone be so kind to correct "Howto's" to "Howtos"?

Done. Wyrfel 12:00, 2 Aug 2005 (CEST)

ThinkPad Buyers guide

It would be cool is there was a buyer guide to 2nd hand think pads.

- For people wishing to join in by getting their own Thinkpad!!

This is a bit hard to accomplish. Remember that ThinkWiki is a site with international scope. What makes sense (in my opinion) is a page that has some notes and hints about what to care for, what are weak parts etc. . But it wouldn't make much sense to create a list of sites where to get them. Or maybe that's just what you meant. ;-) I'll look into creating some infrastructure for that on occasion.

Wyrfel 03:02, 11 Aug 2005 (CEST)

This is a great general resource for ANY Thinkpad user

The promoted Linux-centricity is a minus, IMO. Regardless of the density of Linux content currently extant, the Linux focus seems exclusionary and probably drives away a lot of thinkpad users with useful content to add.

IBM probably has the best support website in the industry (albeit somewhat difficult to navigate), therefore ANY ThinkPad user may find general information there. The good thing about ThinkWiki is that it caters to a specific need, namely the (often difficult) task of installing the linux operating system on ThinkPad notebooks. --MJK 14:54, 14 Sep 2005 (CEST)

I have to agree with MJK. ThinkWikis clear focus is Linux on ThinkPads. IBM provides pretty good support for Windows users, i.e. it wouldn't make sense to double driver listings and such here, since what IBM provides in this area is sufficient. What we can do, however, and what we are already doing here, is to provide additional information for Windows users as well. That's why we introduced Windows as one of our listed distributions and that's also why you find Windows related information scattered around the place. Linux users are searching Windows related ThinkPad sites for information that might be useful for their Linux installations. Let Windows users do the same the other way around. I'll add a little hint to the main page, but we won't change the primary focus. At least not now.

Wyrfel 19:24, 15 Sep 2005 (CEST)

TODO and FIXME templates?

Could a special way to add TODOs and FIXMEs to pages (maybe a template or whatever - I'm not to familiair with Wiki technologies) be considered? I'd like to add some TODOs and FIXMEs but would like to do that in a standardized way ...

Paul Bolle 22:42, 29 Sep 2005 (CEST)

Good point, i'll create templates. Wyrfel 00:25, 30 Sep 2005 (CEST)

Ok, did some of it. There are Stub, Todo and Fixme templates now. Also, pages tagged with these templates will be categorized in Category:NeedsEditing. Todo and Fixme should be used within sections and take one parameter, which should be a job description. Stub should only be used at the very beginning of a page.

Wyrfel 01:52, 30 Sep 2005 (CEST)

Nitpicking

Navigation bar: please s/\(Think\)p\(ad\)/\1P\2/g

Search bar: either drop Go or drop Search (they are equal, aren't they?)

How to read ThinkWiki seems to be better of as a normal entry in the first (upper left) table (and not as a "minor" item in the HOWTOs table).

I would suggest to make ThinkPad models (now a "minor" item in Hardware) the first entry in Hardware.

Paul Bolle 21:13, 8 Oct 2005 (CEST)

Hi, I am looking for some t series users for our beta program. Plese contact mtippett@ati.com.

Search bar: Go will try to go an article by that name while search will actually search fro articles that contain the word. Must keep.

A Forum?

I'm just curious if the idea of a public forum (using phpBB, SMF, whatever) has ever been considered. I think this would be excellent add-on to complement the Wiki. It'd make asking questions for guests and member's alike easier, and possibly afterwards the answers could be contributed into the article. Just an idea. --DuffDudeX1 20:45, 31 Oct 2005 (CET)

There are ThinkPad Forums already, i.e. look at the Links page.

Moreover, there's the linux-thinkpad mailinglist that serves this purpose. ThinkWiki's role is rather to complement that mailing list with a more static way of gathering information and to be found more easily.

Wyrfel 23:54, 31 Oct 2005 (CET)

Oh, thanks for pointing that out, I didn't even notice the links page, I'll have to take a look.

--DuffDudeX1 00:04, 1 Nov 2005 (CET)

Nice skin, folks...

We'd like to steal it, for our geographically local wiki, if no one minds. What pieces would we need for that?
--baylink@wp, etc; jra@baylink.com

Just customize your main.css in your monobook folder.

--akw 10:00, 28 Dec 2005 (CET)

Wiki ToDo List

Hi, I just setup a ToDo List regarding the wiki for me on User:Akw/ToDo.

This is for server admininstration tasks. Feel free to add some points if I forgot something more or less important. I am going to work on the topic in the beginning of next year. I am offline now until 2006/01/06, so I wish a happy good year to all of you (except for the spammers and vandals, of course) ;-)

--akw 10:31, 29 Dec 2005 (CET)

Anti Spam Policy

I decided to activate some anti spam / vandalism features. Now only logged in users can edit pages.

--akw 16:11, 17 January 2006 (CET)

Non-ThinkPad Lenovo laptops

Are the new non-ThinkPad C-series Lenovo laptops within scope of this site?

--Thinker 14:18, 27 February 2006 (CET)

I'd say "NO". They have nothing, and I do mean NOTHING in common with thinkpads.

--hmh 18:27, 20 June 2008 (CEST)

Spam Protection

Hi, could we include a CAPTCHA extension to stop these spam posts.

--Whoopie 19:50, 17 June 2006 (CEST)

Windows 98

Hi, I have just spent ages getting Windows 98SE to work properly on a T30. Some of the drivers that IBM provide are not good, but my T30 is running 98SE quite nicely now.

I would quite like to start a page on installing 98SE and could provide some useful info.

--dieselnutjob 21st June 2006

Go for it. Windows information is welcome in this WiKi as long as it does not cause issues with the Linux information (i.e. be organized, keep them separate). Just add a "installing windows 98SE in a T30" page if you want (look at other "installing foo on bar" pages first to get an idea of the proper layout and page naming).

--hmh 18:29, 20 June 2008 (CEST)

Code in articles

We have many articles with long scripts, which tend to get very mess and unreadable.

Alternatives:

Move all scripts to dedicated pages called Code/foo. For example, the huge code block in ACPI fan control script#Variable_speed_control_scripts goes to Code/tp-fancontrol, with its metdata in the talk page. It is referenced as tp-fancontrol (download) (that's {{CodeRef|tp-fancontrol}})..
Tell people to use an external hosting (http://sf.net, http://pastebin.ca etc.).
Make Wikimedia support non-image uploads. But then we won't have nice diffs.

Opinions?

--Thinker 13:51, 26 July 2006 (CEST)

I've fully converted ACPI fan control script as a test case. What do you think?

--Thinker 23:34, 26 July 2006 (CEST)

Benchmarks missing page

The benchmarks link on the main menu seems to be broken...

Rgrds

Peter

Press coverage

"In addition, the ThinkPad PC product line has probably had more specific Linux support than any other computer brand. In fact, one of the most useful Linux community sites, ThinkWiki, is devoted to nothing but Linux on the ThinkPad." --desktoplinux.com

Exploding Batteries on Thinkpads?

Is this worth adding to the news page? Or somewhere else on thinkwiki? Or does a sensationalist forum post not a news item make? (Actually, I just found another mention of it on thinkwiki in Battery safety)

An article on Slashdot mentioned in passing an incident where it appears at least one Thinkpad's battery exploded. The forum post reporting the explosion (scroll down past the huge registration begging) also contains photographs. The laptop is allegedly a T42 or T42p, according to someone who examined the pictures, and while it certainly could be (it looks similar enough to mine), I don't know if we can postively identify it. --Daniel Axelrod 03:05, 18 September 2006 (CEST)

Google ads

I have plans upgrading the hardware of the ThinkWiki server (DualCore SMP machine, more RAM, etc.) for getting faster response times. This will happen in someday in november. To pay the monthly fees for this new server, I decided to put some unobtrusive google text-only ads in a new box below the toolbox in the navigation area. I hope this ads are not too offending. I really dislike ads on websites, but these text-only ads are IMHO an acceptable compromise. Opinions?

--akw 12:52, 4 October 2006 (CEST)

The ads on the navbar are indeed unobtrusive, and in their current position don't take up any screen real estate, so no objection (despite my dislike for ads). The ad strip at the bottom of the page is (very) slightly annoying, since pressing End now shows a few less lines from the article.

--Thinker

Agreed. Go for it. Also, may I humbly suggest that you offer for purchase and also for subscription an off-line version of ThinkWiki? I have often needed access to the ThinkWiki data for reference while writing/debugging stuff on the road, and I would also sleep much better knowing I have all this information in a CD near me...

--hmh 14:25, 4 October 2006 (CEST)

MediaWiki Upgrade

I finally upgraded ThinkWiki to the latest MediaWiki 1.8.2. This included an update to the database structure. I hope the upgrade will bring a massive speed improvement. Please report any issues regarding the update.

--akw 13:27, 23 October 2006 (CEST)

I just tweaked the apache config. This will greatly improve performance, I hope :-)

I also recompiled apache2 with some optimizations. Now the cpu load of the server is significantly lower. <g>

--akw 15:25, 26 October 2006 (CEST)

VaioWiki

Anyone who owns a Sony VAIO please help me building vaiowiki.org which is a sister project of ThinkWiki, which I just started. It hast got an independent database, but should have the same structure as ThinkWiki and of course, common articles can just be copied.

--akw 16:13, 15 March 2007 (CET)

New user creation enabled again

Hi everyone. I just managed to install a captcha system on the new-user-creation. Also the captcha is needed on editing pages with external links in it. Hope this will help us to get rid of the spam bots.

--akw 14:47, 9 May 2007 (CEST)

Sorry for downtime yesterday

Yesterday the server experienced the threatful OOM-Killer (out-of-memory process killer). A memory upgrade (4GB) will be done as soon as possible.

--akw 07:42, 4 June 2007 (CEST)

Implement 3-character searches

A lot of the content that I place in wikis benefit greatly from the ability to search for three character terms. This is definitely true for technically-oriented wikis where searches for 'AMD', 'CPU', etc. would be regularly entered. In my case, I was looking for 'fan' problems with the 'T40'. AFAIK, these can't be searched on ThinkWiki.

I've copied a snippet from another MediaWiki on the topic in case you're interested and this could help set it up for you...

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Short_words_in_searches
* http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:FAQ#...is_a_search_for_a_short_keyword_giving_no_hits.3F
* http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/fulltext-fine-tuning.html
* http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/using-system-variables.html
* http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/option-files.html
* http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/4.1/en/mysql-config-wizard-file-location.html

(FYI: this is probably a Windows rant, but might be helpful.)

I know no one else cares about this but I still wanted a forum to vent my frustrations..

I've been trying sporadically to get our mediawiki installation to allow us to have three-character search terms. This is to allow us to do searches on stuff such as 'asp', 'iis', 'svn', etc. The default minimum length is set to 4. (This is the mysql fulltext search default - not mediawiki limited.)

Simple matter, right? Lots of documentation on how to do this simple task... Modify a mysql .ini file or two, stop/restart a server and voila (or violas in my case.)

Most of the documentation talks about modifying my.ini files. There are several of these scattered on the mediawikivm file system. I updated them, stopped/started, debugged, etc., and still no change in behavior.

Then some documentation talked about the mysterious my.cnf files. Well, mediawikivm is a Windows 2003 box. There are zero (0 - zilch - nada) .cnf files on the system. There were some strange 'my' files identified as 'SpeedDial' but they didn't allow any operations.

I don't care how you set your Explorer File Preferences, there are none. Not to be easily cast aside, I rooted around some more in Google and found references to a magical registry entry named 'nevershowext' which precludes any Windows operations from showing the extension or allowing Edit/etc operations.

So, after modifying around 10 registry entries, finding the my.cnf file where it should be, changing the "ft_min_word_len=3" entry, we now have valid searches for those important/stupid cases.

RSS feed

there is a bug on the RSS feed. when clicking on the RSS self discovery icon in the address bar of firefox on the Recentchanges page the following error appears:

XML Parsing Error: xml declaration not at start of external entity
Location: http://www.thinkwiki.org/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&feed=atom
Line Number 2, Column 1:<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

The XML declaration must be on the first line and start at the first character position of the line.

How does this site's search work?

I'd really appreciate info on getting a Google-driven site search working like on this site. I see Special:GoogleFind in the url but can't find info on that. I presume it's not Google Custom Search Engine. Many thanks! --Chriswaterguy 04:57, 29 April 2008 (CEST)