I recently made the mistake of plugging my Lenovo X1 Carbon (Gen 5) into a 5 volt USB-C charger overnight. The LED on the side indicated that it was charging but, when I woke up in the morning, it obviously hadn’t. Worse, it now refused to charge even when plugged into the correct charger.

The fix is simple (although undocumented as far as I can tell). Basically, you need to reset the battery as follows:

1. Unplug from any power sources (this won’t work if you don’t do this).
2. Reboot into the BIOS setup (F1 on boot).
3. Navigate to the Power menu.
4. Select the “Disable built-in battery” option.
5. Wait for the laptop to power off and then wait 30 seconds.
6. Connect the power and start the laptop.

This will temporarily disable the battery which seems to reset any “bad charger” bits.

Hopefully, this will save others some time and frustration.

The X1 Carbon is otherwise a great laptop with an awesome keyboard. However, because this is my blog and I can rant all I want here:

1. The dedicated Ethernet port is pretty much useless given the ubiquity of USB-C. I’d have much preferred an additional USB or USB-C port.
2. The nipple seems a bit firmer than the one on my X220 and also seems to get into the “wandering cursor” state a bit more frequently.

Caveat lector: I wrote this post in high school; it’s likely outdated and poorly written.

I ran into a few problems during the upgrade but all of them were fixable.

Partial Upgrade fix: Downgrade non-ubuntu packages to their ubuntu versions if an ubuntu version exists. My system refused to complete the upgrade (and I had to upgrade it through aptitude) because of a few package conflicts (mostly from the schmidtke repository).

Numpad Fix: My computers numpad stopped working after upgrading. Somehow an acceptability option had been turned on. To fix this go to System > Preferences > Keyboard and go to the mouse keys tab and uncheck the checkbox.

Remove custom G15 drivers: A while back I had installed the G15 drivers based on a tutorial posted on the ubuntu wiki. These drivers should now be uninstalled as Ubuntu Hardy comes with its own drivers.

Everything appears to be working fine now.

Caveat lector: I wrote this post in high school; it’s likely outdated and poorly written.

It turns out that my wireless problem is in my router not my computer. My 2wire router crashes when I try to connect to it using the iwl3945 driver. Ubuntu Gutsy used the ipw3945 driver (now deprecated). That driver worked. Otherwise, Hardy is cool.

Caveat lector: I wrote this post in high school; it’s likely outdated and poorly written.

The wireless card continues to not work but I am installing anyway (nothing to loose). I am hoping that the fix on launchpad will work.

Edit: The battery monitor applet does work in GNOME.

Caveat lector: I wrote this post in high school; it’s likely outdated and poorly written.

I just tried out Xubuntu hardy beta with full disk encryption.

Verdict: Broken.

1. Xubuntu would not properly display my battery percentage (the panel applet would display 28%, 100%, or 0%).
2. The wireless worked fine and then suddenly stopped working (I had not updated or otherwise messed with my system). When I conncted to a wireless network said network would go down (tested with 2wire only).

I am now trying ubuntu 8.04 beta x86_64 (the 64 bit version) on my dual core, 64bit Intel laptop. I will post the results.

Caveat lector: I wrote this post in high school; it’s likely outdated and poorly written.

Today I spent 10 hrs fixing my hostname.

I had just bought the domain stebalien.com and was fiddling around with my network settings with network-admin and found the domain box. I typed in my new domain to see what the setting did. Nothing happened for a while so I erased the setting and changed the hosts file back to its original state (without the domain name). Later, while I was using Firefox, my session crashed. I logged back in and received this error:

(process:6725): Gtk-WARNING **: This process is currently running setuid or setgid.
This is not a supported use of GTK+. You must create a helper
program instead. For further details, see:

    http://www.gtk.org/setuid.html

Refusing to initialize GTK+.

(process:6729): Gtk-WARNING **: This process is currently running setuid or setgid.
This is not a supported use of GTK+. You must create a helper
program instead. For further details, see:

    http://www.gtk.org/setuid.html

Refusing to initialize GTK+.

I was consequently logged out. This error had nothing to do with the hostname so I assumed that one of my files had been corrupted. After reinstalling half of my system (sudo aptitude reinstall packages) and looking through all of my configuration files I finally logged in using startx. I was immediately logged back out with a hostname internal error. I spent another hour going over my host configuration files (/etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, …) and all of my DNS configuration files. I finally logged back in using the Failsafe Terminal, typed in sudo network-admin and re-added my domain name, logged back out and in, and my session did not crash. I then proceeded to launch firefox. The page did not load. I could ping, tracerout, and use elinks (a text based web browser for the console) but I Firefox would not load any website. I tinkered with my network-admin settings for 15 minuets before I finally realized that I had a backup of my network-admin settings. I restored my settings and proceeded to write this blog post. I am still clueless as to what my problem was but am happy that it was at least fixed.