The Missing Link?

I have had a pile of computer components building up. The parts are in various stages of usability - some are bad or broken, some are fine but I don't need them. Some would work fine with the addition of a couple of more pieces.

What to do with it all? I felt bad at the thought of dumping a bunch of stuff on Goodwill when I know it doesn't work. There are e-waste recycling days through the county, or fire stations, or electronics stores, but they only happen about every 3 months.

Gold'n West Surplus in Riverside, CA ( click here for to go there ) takes computer equipment for ewaste recycling or resale. Best of all it's free of charge!

. . . so now I have a nearly limitless supply of old computer stuff ( Freecycle, see previous posts) and I have a way to get rid of the dross, Gold'n West.

Let the construction of my Robot Army begin!

More Slack Adventures

I have kept trying. Slackware 3.0, 4.0, 4.0 LiveCD, and Knoppix 5.1. All ended in disaster in one way or another. Slack 4 got the furthest. It got the hard drive set up, both Linux space and swap space, then crashed to automatic reboot during installation.

There was a kernel panic at another point - I'm always amused when I can freak out Linux that badly.

This has been done with one RAM module removed, so flaky RAM isn't an issue. The OS is just having some serious issue with the mobo, proc, or HD.

At this point I am leaning toward ordering a smaller HD from PC Liquidators and trying that. Though it does occur to me that I'm supposed to have six weeks of work from my Other Job in Oct, Nov, and Dec, and that I could just build a basic box in the time it will take me to amass a set of hardware that works with the software.


By way of comparison, I am using the Slackware 12.1 on my main machine for a couple of hours each night, and I haven't had the slightest problem with it. So if I can GET it installed, it'll be fine.

Old Tyme Weirdness

. . . so I am cobbling some of my Freecycle treasures and some of my spare parts into a system. I have a 333MHz Celeron with 320MB RAM (a 256MB DIMM and a 64MB DIMM), and an 6GB hard drive.

I tried to load up Slackware 12.1, and it didn't go well. I ran through the procedure of clearing off and partitioning the hard drive six times. Five times it locked up at some point in the process; the sixth time I skipped it and went straight to the installation, and it locked up there.

Clearly, something isn't happy.

I have a number of options - plugging the drive into my Windows machine and partitioning it there, or using an older version of Slackware. There's always the option of ordering a new small HD from PC Liqudiators and using that. I should mention that Slackware warns that using a large drive with too high a cylinder count may cause installation problems. Yeah, apparently it will! I could also remove the second stick of RAM, leaving 256MB, and see if somehow that RAM is the problem.

Oh well, more tinkering is required.

Minor Setbacks and USB Weirdness

I've had a couple of minor setbacks. One is that I have verified that the hard drive in the pile o' Freecycle stuff is indeed bad. I'll have to get a small IDE drive somewhere. PC Liquidator comes to mind (click here to go there).

The other one is that I have no keyboard or mouse that is usable with the 486. Serial mice and AT keyboards are so rare now I'll probably have to go through eBay. (Of course, I could use Freecycle, but these may just be too obscure . . .)

. . . and another thing! Twice now I've had zero USB function when I boot my computer. A simple reset brings up USB, but that's happened more than once is troubling. Plus, it looks like my mouse is going . . . it now takes 2, 3, or 4 left-clicks before the computer hears me.

More news as I discover it . . .

Museum Piece!

The 'seriously ancient' mini-tower I got from Freecycle really is! It's a 80486 SX, with 8MB memory, running Windows 95. Amazingly, it boots and gets all the way to the Windows 95 desktop!

It turns out my only AT keyboard is bad, and I don't have a serial mouse. So I think this will go into a closet until I have the resources to restore it.

Freecycle Comes Through

I got my first load of Freecycle loot today! Freecycle friend Michelle generously donated 2 computer towers, 2 monitors, a hard drive, a set of amplified speakers, a power supply, and a keyboard to my cause.

I have examined a few of the items. The keyboard, power supply, and one of the monitors were bad, and are going straight to E-Waste. Signs for the second monitor are not hopeful - the VGA connector has a couple of missing pins! We'll see if it's usable. The speakers are fine, and may become an iPod-based home stereo system.

The mid-tower turns out to be something of a diamond in the rough. It's complete except for a hard drive. Everything else appears to be okay. It POSTS, except for having a hard drive. By which, I mean that at least the memory is good, and it can detect the CD-ROM and floppy drive. No telling yet if the 'extra' hard drive in the pile o' stuff was the hard drive for this machine. Or what shape it's in. I promised Michelle I'd load up the drive in my system and look for personal data before I reformatted it, so there's some work to be done yet.

For those of you keeping score at home, the mid-tower is a Celeron 333MHz with 256MB RAM. It's generations old now, but it's perfect for my headless-linux-in-the-closet scheme. Come to think of it, I have memory that should work with it stashed away in my parts box. I'll have to find it.

The only clue about the heart of the mini-tower system is that it comes with a 5 1/4" disk drive. So it may be seriously ancient.

Freecycle (Freecycle Part 1)

(Continued from 'Freecycle Part 0')

What I needed was to take an old computer somebody has relegated to the back of a garage or closet. A computer that works, but is too old to be useful for Windows. I don't even need a working Windows, since I'm just going to replace it with Linux. There ought to be plenty of them out there, and they ought to be very inexpensive. By which I mean free.

I was thinking all this out when my wife told me about Freecycle. Freecycle is a network of Yahoo groups that works like the midwest's `Radio Tradio` People post ads for things they are offering to give away, or things they need to pick up for free. When a group member reads an ad they can respond to, a discussion follows at the email address listed in the ad.

Registration is simple. You put in a city name at their web page (http://www.freecycle.org) and it steers you to the appropriate group. Registering membership works like any regular Yahoo group. Then the moderator of your group lets you in, which can take a day or so.

Once you're in, you can post messages marked 'WANTED:', for things you're looking for, or 'OFFERED:' for things you're trying to get rid of. From there, people can email the address you provide, with private discussion about whether what they have would work for you, and to arrange detials of pickup or drop off. Once you have some solid leads, you can post a 'TAKEN:' message to let the group know you're done with the topic.

It's like a really slow, friendly eBay. With no money changing hands.

I posted a WANTED ad for an old computer. In fact, here's my ad:

I'm looking for an old computer to throw Linux on and put on our
network. Anything is fine - 486, Pentium, Pentium II, AMD K5 or K6. Just as long as it works, or used to work.

Amount of RAM or HD size doesn't matter.

I don't need the monitor or keyboard or speakers, but will take if you need to get rid of it as a package.

Having Windows doesn't matter, as I'm just going to replace it.

Anywhere in (city name) area is fine.

I posted at 7:03 AM on a Sunday. In 40 minutes I had a solid lead. In three hours I had three different offers. See? It works!

Trying to negotiate pick up and coordinating between people's days off has been the slowdown, so I am still pursuing this. (It's now Tuesday) With three offers on the table, it shouldn't take much longer.

Need Another System (Freecycle Part 0)

I've decided I need another computer.

I have a Linux partition of my desktop system, and it's fine for getting acquainted. But Linux excels at being a server. If I'm switching partitions all day, I'm bringing the server up and down all day. When I'm in the Windows partition, my Linux server can't be, er, server-ing. Better to have a dedicated system. Besides, it's all the more tinkering and experimenting to blog about!


Then the question is how to acquire another system? I could build one, but I won't have the budget until the end of November, probably. I have modest needs - even a Pentium or Pentium II would be plenty. But buying one would be $70 or so, after shipping. That's kind of too much, considering that I want something that's on purpose almost obsolete.

Hmmmmm . . . .

Laptop touchpad mystery solved

The touch pad on our Toshiba Satellite laptop had suddenly stopped working. That was a bummer, because it's our first laptop and we've had it less than three months.

It turns out there's a function key combination to turn the track pad on and off. A simple FN + F9 set things right, and the laptop is back to 100% functionality.

I don't know why you would want to turn the touch pad off. Anyway, I'm glad I thought to check that before doing anything more drastic.

More Slack

I am now able to SSH into the Linux side of my machine from our Vista and XP machines.

I use and recommend the excellent telnet / SSH client 'Putty' available at putty.org, click here to go there.

I was also able to discover a network share on the XP machine, though automatic network browsing is disabled in Linux. I'll have to look into setting that up.

Slackware Linux 12.1

I have installed slack 12.1 on a 10GB partition on my machine. I've only used it for a few minutes, but it seems to work. Here I am posting on my blog, after all.

I must say, installation was the smoothest I've ever experienced in a Slackware release (I've used 3.0, 4.0, 10.something, and now 12.1). Slackware recognized my odd hard drive setup (four Windows partitions with a linux partition in the middle), it found my network and sound cards, and installed it packages without a hitch. The boot manager installed properly. That was something I used to have alot of trouble with. It also recognizes my USB keyboard even in the splash screen, something else that used to be problematic.

The boot manager is now displayed on the Slackware splash screen, an effect I really like. A separate Lilo menu is available with a key press, or you can use the arrow keys to select between options on the splash screen itself.

For some reason, I am having to choose the text display mode at each startup. I'll have to look for a .conf entry or something to use the right default without asking me every time.

So the installation went really well, and now I'm off to play with my new OS!

DSLinux Voted Off The Island

I'm giving Damn Small Linux (DSLinux) the boot.

It exhibited bizarre behavior, and I never felt like I could trust it to work. Two quick examples: To exit the Window Manager, I'd use the Shutdown menu option off the system folder. That would result in the Window Manager closing and leaving a command line. Typing 'exit' from the command line would . . . restart the Window Manager! What's linux for 'GO AWAY'? It may have been user error, but it is darn goofy behavior, and there was no indication of what to do differently. Besides, you'd think the 'Shutdown' menu option would, er, shut the machine down.

The other odd behavior I encountered was that the shell window, the console, would spring up when you clicked its dedicated button at the bottom of the screen. It would spring up the first time. When I finished my session, I exited the command line, and it appeared to exit normally. After that, the console was MIA. The second, third, and subsequent attempts to launch the console would have no result. This again sounds like you're doing it wrong, but it's CLICKING A BUTTON. How wrong can you be? It looks to me like it don't work.

And then there's the ugly damn wallpaper. That must be where the 'damn' in Damn Small Linux comes from. It's a silly subject to use all this vitriol on, but the desktop was so ugly it was distracting. And I looked and looked for a way to change the wallpaper and couldn't find it. All I could find was 'Change Theme' which didn't do anything.

I'm sure DSLinux is fine for some things, just not any of the three things I tried to do with it.

I think I'll use Knoppix 5.1 for the time being, until I can get my system installed with PC-BSD. (Ironically, DSLinux is based upon Knoppix. Except Knoppix works right. BA-ZING! Okay, enough DSLinux abuse . . .)

Viewscreen, On!

I have a new monitor, a Dell 19" Widescreen (model number SE198WFP). I am running it using VGA, not digital video.

I like it fine. It's my first flat panel monitor, so I don't have much to compare it to. The picture is clear enough that I've restarted my habit of watching '24' through iTunes. Make the picture full screen and turn the lights out, and you've lost me for an hour.

The additional screen real estate (versus my previous 17" monitor) makes for plenty of room for using TADS. I can have the editor, compiler, and debugging message window open, with lots of room to spare.

I haven't had any picture quality or driver problems.

*poof* All Gone!

The trackpad on our new Toshiba laptop suddenly quit working about a week ago. I haven't had time to look at it, but in a cursory check it looks like it's still in Windows Hardware Manager, and the driver is still loaded.

I don't know if the fault lies with a Windows Vista hiccup or if the hardware just died. I'll examine it more closely and post a report here.

Everything else on the laptop (still) works fine; it just works using a mouse now.

Surprise!

Hey, did you know hitting ALT and POWER at the same time on my lame $12 Wal-Mart keyboard will turn off Windows INSTANTLY?

Neither did I, until a minute ago!

Damn Small Linux

I'm playing around with 'Damn Small Linux'. It's a minimalist Linux distro designed to be run off a CD or USB key. Its maximum size on disk is 50MB, so it can fit almost anywhere.

An alternative way of running it - the one I'm using - is to install it to HD and run it as an app. That's right, it's an entire Linux inside a Windows window! And, yes - by 'entire Linux' I mean XWindows, too!

So the question became, "What would I do with Linux, if I had it?" I never came up with a real answer. The closest I could come was that I would work through the charmingly old-fashioned Rescued By UNIX (by Augie Hansen, Jamsa Press, 1994) so all I'd need is a command line. Click HERE for the book info

With its default window manager and theme, I think a better name for DSLinux is, "&^#@%$! Ugly Linux". It's freakin' awful, even after I spent a few minutes playing with color choices and resolutions.

I'm still a little freaked out at the idea of going from Linux to Windows simply by ALT-TAB -ing.

Information on Damn Small Linux is available by clicking here!

(Note: I can report that, just like in Windows, the DSLinux version of Firefox doesn't care how you check or uncheck options in dialog boxes; it does whatever it wants.)

(Further Note: I know 'Damn Small Linux' is abbreviated 'DSL'. I am using my own abbreviation 'DSLinux' to spare less-technical folk confusion with the broadband Internet access technology of the same name)

(Furthest Note: This post was posted (mostly) using Damn Small Linux!)

Last Step For Now

Finishing R5-D4 Block 3

Today I put my NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500 video card back in. I now have 256MB of video memory, as opposed to the 64MB for the chip built in to the motherboard.

I had a game of Age of Mythology and it ran fine.

My crappy monitor does spoil the effect though. Hopefully I'll get it replaced soon.

Block 3 Motherboard and Processor

I have to give a 'thumbs up' to Ascendtech!

Motherboard and processor combos are fairly easy to come by, but I like the twist Ascendtech puts on them - you can specify a standard or high-capacity cooling system, choose hard drives, or order some other parts with the mobo combo, and Ascendtech will assemble and test your setup before it ships!

I chose an FIC motherboard with Athlon 64 processor, a combo they had on special that week. After some consideration, I stayed with the standard cooling solution. The processor and fan were installed onto the motherboard and the whole thing was tested. When it arrived it was ready to mount in the case.

I appreciated knowing that everything had been tested. I used to get parts from Fry's Electronics, and all three times I bought motherboard and processors pairs, one or more of the parts had to be exchanged. With Ascendtech, a whole level of potential headache is removed!

Shipping went smoothly, and the parts arrived right when Ascendtech said they would. The packaging seemed adequate to protect the parts. The box was somewhat customized to accommodate the processor and fan having been mounted already. The box was study and there was plenty of padding around the vitals.

When I build another system, I'll definitely go to Ascendtech first.

You can check it out for yourself by clicking this link!

R5-D4 Block 3

Last week I rebuilt my desktop computer, R5-D4. This edition is, in military parlance, R5-D4 Block 3, the third edition of my system.

My old processor and hard drive were destroyed in separate, unrelated accidents. (Don't think too hard, just keep reading . . .)


The specs of the new system:

FIC K8M-800M motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Processor (2.0 GHz)
1GB DDR memory (Crucial brand)
40GB hard drive (Western Digital Caviar)
64MB VIA / S3 video (Built in to motherboard)
AC97 audio (Built in to motherboard)
Realtek RTL8139 ethernet (Built in to motherboard)

See next post regarding the ordering and shipping of the motherboard and processor.

Everything went together well. I hadn't lost my touch, it seems. Everything worked the first time. I was very pleased.

Since the rebuild, I have had zero hardware problems.

TJTM Re-Launch

Hi Everyone!

I'm back! After a long absence, I am starting up The John Technical Manual again. I hope you'll all find things here that interest you.


Here are some new things in the past couple of months that I may talk about:

I just finished rebuilding my desktop computer. Athlon 64, 1GB RAM, Windows 2000 Professional.

A few months ago, I bought an Xbox. Not a 360, the older original Xbox. It's the only modern-era game console I've owned.

We now own a laptop. We got a single-core Celeron Toshiba at a steal ($390) and never looked back. It runs Vista, which I turn out to like just fine. It plays shows from Hulu, web surfs, emails, and plays streaming radio from pandora.com.

I'm sure I'll find plenty of other things to chatter about.