Month: July 2022

Apple MacBook Pro 15 inch (2007)

I have this nice MacBook Pro (3,1) from 2007. It has Intel’s Core 2 Duo running 2.2 GHz. Unfortunately the battery is dead or electronics reponsible for charging it. It arrived fully charged and was working for like 2 hours or so. In case the battery runs our of any kind of charge and it is not recognized by the system, then the computer will not start at all. This was like a shock to me, but it’s the Apple hardware.

To start MacBook without the battery you need to:

  • press and hold power button for 10 seconds with power cord unplugged
  • without releasing power button, but with power cord plugged in, keep power button for another 10 seconds
  • release power button for a second
  • press power button one more time
  • computer should start

Then buy new battery or replace charging electronics.

Elasticsearch 7: Could not locate that index-pattern

Recently I’ve been tryout Elasticsearch 7 with Kibana and Metricbeat as well as Filebeat. I encountered some issues with indices so I dropped dashboards and visualizations and tried to load them again. I also cleared indices and patterns thru index management page. If you get error message like “could not locate that index-pattern” or something with fields being non-optimized then you should take few actions.

Please note that it was my lab Elastic installation so I do not care about deleting indices.

First you need to either stop all of your metricbeat modules sending data to the cluster or do some magic with the indices itself to prevent from auto-creating. Then delete all indices related to those two modules as well as its index patterns. Then go to Saved objects and delete all visualizations and dashboards. If you have custom things, then most probably you need to remember not to select them for deletion. If you have cleared out all of these you may go to sample machine with metricbeat node and run:

sudo metricbeat setup --index-management
sudo metricbeat setup --dashboards

Effectively you will get a index alias and bare index pointing at each other. This is the main difference between manually creating pattern and letting metricbeat doing its things properly. Now you should have visualizations created correctly which means that also dashboads should work fine. Neither Elasticsearch 7 is working correctly nor messages are saying anything useful. Maybe version 8 brings little more in this aspect, but I thought that writing about this case might save some time for someone looking for similar issue happening on their environment.

(X)Ubuntu on ThinkPad T61

Recently I got Lenovo ThinkPad T61 in working conditions. It has Intel Core 2 Duo T7100 @1.8 GHz, 4 GB of DDR2. At its maximum it can have up to 8 GB of RAM and C2D T9500, altough I’m not quite sure if changing CPU would be straightforward operation – it seems to be socketed, not BGA. I purchased it because of NVIDIA NVS 140M dicrete GPU onboard and unconventionally high screen resolution of 1680×1050. This comes as a benefit but makes few things difficult.

Windows 10 works just fine. But if you want to have Ubuntu on it… it will not be easy. I have tried Ubuntu 18, 20, 21, 22 and none of it worked out of the box. The only one working flawlessly was Ubuntu 16. It is however too old not to be consider as a obsolete experience. Even after upgrading from 16 do 18 and so on, there are GPU locks and freezes.

There is a out of the box distro called XUbuntu, which is based on regular Ubuntu with lightweight window manager Xfce. It has lower memory requirements. First I have tried with the latest XUbuntu which is 22, however the only available NVIDIA driver was 510 which is not compatible with NVS 140M. Nouveau drivers do not work either. Finally I have tried XUbuntu 18 and it works just fine. By default it offers NVIDIA 340 driver at Software & Updates section.

In other works, if you have ThinkPad T61 and would like to have decent working experience, go for XUbuntu 16. It even has ability to install as a dual boot with Windows and recognizes previous Ubuntu installations offering understandable messages what will happen during installation.