Game machine

I started working on a console game machine last night. The idea is to outfit an old PC with TV out cards and run XMAME/XMESS.

I started with a stripped Intel board and put a Pentium 233MHz processor on it and 32MB of EDO RAM. I had a couple of hard drives, both Seagate, the 2GB drive was no good, but the 1.2GB worked fine. I managed to dig up all the components for a working system, minus the case. I think I'm going to put the first one in an old SGI Indigo case.

The next problem was that the TV out didn't seem to work, so I ended up grabbing an old monitor that could barely do 640x480, it sucks so bad that graphical boot loader screens look like a Picasso painting. The system booted fine until I ran into another problem, the ISA Ethernet card I was using, which had a Realtek 8019 chip, didn't seem to work. I replaced the card with a 10/100 Compaq NIC and was off to the races.

The next step was setting up an NFS server on my notebook; this was a snap thanks to YaST2's (SuSE) graphical tools - a NFS server in 20 seconds. I would have prefered to use Debian, but my discs are at The Working Centre and I don't have high speed at home. Installation from the NFS server went off with only a minor hitch, without a mouse it was difficult to control what software was being installed because there was no "scroll down" keyboard equivalent - I should have used the txt-network image. I plan on installing Debian anyway, so this may be a moot point. But here's a screen shot of the Mandrake install anyway:



Pictures to follow. Day 1, the project has been a success so far. Minor glitches. I believe the T.V. out problem to be an issue with my T.V. switching box, something to look into later. I definately need more NICs if I'm going to mass produce this thing. I made a brief start into SCSI but decided to leave the SCSI cards out for better use. I also need to gather some metal to refashion the old Indigo box. Work calls so I'll have to get moving for today.

Laptop update

Well, it looks like we might be looking at sending some Dell CPi 300MHz notebooks overseas. They seem to be the least expensive for the power. The only problem seems to be batteries, no one is willing to warranty the batteries to hold a charge.

I've found a local dealer who sells the books for $300CDN. The U.S. dealer we were looking at sells the same notebooks for $190U.S., not much difference in the grand scheme of things, except that I will probably have to do most of the installations myself - a day or two at most!

There is another company I'm looking into that is upgrading their notebooks, we'll see if they can give us a better cost/feature combination.

The Working Centre Linux Project

I've mentioned The Working Centre Linux Project (WCLP) a few times already. For those who've just surfed in from Google or some other portal WCLP is a Debian-based linux distribution we created to make it easy for computer recycling volunteers to install linux on recycled machines.



WCLP can be run on as little as a 486DX66 with 16MB of RAM and a 500MB hard drive, and this means a full desktop OS with a few necessary programs: word processing, web browser, etc. Realistically, a decent machine would be a Pentium 133MHz with 64MB of RAM and a 1GB+ hard drive.

WCLP takes over any partitions you have and wipes out your whole hard drive. Be aware that if you decide to try out WCLP, it destroys anything that's on your hard drive, so save important data first.

Originally the distribution was designed to be installed over a network from an NFS server. That meant all machines had a network card - which was the case anyway because we wanted to make all machines high-speed internet ready.



The Working Centre also has a number of display showcases of old hardware ranging from punch cards to reels of backup tape and more modern stuff like the ECS K7S5A motherboard.

Tuxmagazine, no longer print, pdf

Sad news, SSC has decided to pull the plug on the print edition of Tuxmagazine and drop Marcel Gagne as the editor. But to put a positive spin on things, if SSC needs the cash to keep Linux Journal floating, then it's probably a good decision. I hate to see Marcel not get the editorship of the magazine, but it's probably better because it means he can concentrate on his new book (which he's keeping under wraps other than to say it has to do with the Linux desktop) and more lucrative writing.

And the move might not be a bad thing for SSC. O'Reilly does have their Safari library, and I know people who subscribe to Safari, so it isn't impossible that the PDF magazine might one day make the company money.

So, when's the first issue of Tuxspot coming out? Right now I'm looking at about a month or so before I release the first print issue. If you're interested in subscribing, writing articles for, or getting an ad in the news zine, please contact me at: charm-at-porchlight-dot-ca

VCR fixed!

I'm the very happy owner of a Sharp VC-H973, a 4-Head Hi-Fi Stereo VCR I bought at least 7 years ago. Until a couple of weeks ago this baby never let me down! Since I own a lot of VHS movies, being without a VCR is a like being without a computer.

I made some changes, moved things around, now the VCR seems to work fine. I think the problem was that it was collecting dust. It was in a covered area where dust is more likely to collect. Special thanks to my good friend Ghansham who taught me how to clean and repair the VCR, the quality of picture has been great ever since.

Sun Sparcstation 5

I've been working on a few projects lately. One of those projects is trying to get my Sparc 5 going. I bought 3 Sparc 5's, all of which had holes physically drilled through the proprietary SCSI hard drives - SUCKS! Argh, that meant I had to get a new SCSI drive for the machine. Luckily enough the good folks at The Working Centre, specifically Dave B., said I could take the drive someone had donated.



Unfortunately my Sparc has no floppy drive, no cdrom, and was lacking ram. On the positive side, it has a 110 MHz processor, the best of the class for running Linux. (There is a 170MHz model, but it was a completely different processor).

About 6 months ago I bought a 13w3 monitor for $50CDN, plus a couple of Sparc 2's and a Sparc 1, all three of which I donated to TWC. Keith from TWC gave me a better 13w3 monitor, so I donated the old one to TWC. I'm kicking myself a bit now because Bill R. once asked me if there was any need for an ultrasparc at TWC - I said no because I was in one of those cleaning up the house moods and we have an aweful lot of stuff that gets donated that's useless. Most of the people who come to TWC come looking for PC platform and MS Windows, so UNIX boxes are not a big thing...but it sure would be nice to have now. Hopefully someone saved it from the dumpster.

So, the last thing I need to acquire is a keyboard and mouse. I've posted a message in uw.forsale looking for one locally. If you're in Waterloo and have a sparc 5 compatible keyboard and mouse, please contact me: charm-at-prochlight-dot-ca

Microsoft MN-720 802.11g WiFi adapter

I've successfully configured a Microsoft MN-720 802.11g WiFi adapter on SuSE Linux. The process was as follows:

1. Strip the mn720-50.sys and mn720.inf drivers from the Microsoft Windows driver disc (put it in a drivers directory off my home directory).
2. Install ndiswrapper from rpmfind.net
3. With the WiFi adapter removed:

ndiswrapper -i mn720.inf
ndiswrapper -l
modprobe ndiswrapper

Now plug in the mn-720 card and voila!

Note: I've found that SuSE doesn't properly shut down while the card is installed, so I remove it before halting the system. I read somewhere that it had something to do with the Windows driver being bloated and that if I recompiled my kernel with a certain option it would stop the problem. No time to try it yet.

Used Laptop donations wanted

As some who read my web log might know I'm involved with a number of organizations trying to get computer hardware in the hands of those less fortunate than those of us who can afford to buy a 1GHz+ notebook.

I've joined up with a group of individuals in both the U.S. and Canada and we've decided to start sending recycled notebooks with K-12 software overseas, but we need donations. If possible we're trying to get as many of the same type as possible in order to minimize the amount of work required to get Linux on the notebooks - that way volunteers installing Linux don't have to learn all the intricacies of configuring the hardware - we can set up a couple and tailor our distribution towards a specific notebook.

If you're a big company looking to unload a bunch of notebooks please contact me at: charm@porchlight.ca

Please note that I have pretty high spam filters, so I may not get all mail, try to avoid spam keywords.

Thanks,

Charles

WiFi Tips under SuSE 9.2 Professional

When I went looking for a WiFi card for my notebook I brought my notebook with me and asked various retailers if I could test their WiFi cards in my machine. Some said no, but a surprisingly equal amount said yes. Out of 6 cards, only 1 configured itself without me having to install a driver. Needless to say, I ended up buying the card that I could simply plug-and-play. That card is as follows:

Symbol Technologies Model: LA-4121-1100-1C
Nortel Networks eMobility 802.11b Wireless DSSS PC Card

One of the things I learned trying to set up WiFi on my notebook is that it seems that regular ethernet apparently conflicts with the WiFi routing. I say apparently because I haven't looked into it enough, but it seems to me that it shouldn't, and that those who told me are in fact mistaken.

Regardless, I've disabled regular ethernet and created a "PROFILE" for WiFi, so all I have to do to switch between ethernet and WiFi is change profiles.

Another pointer is to make sure when you're configuring your WiFi card that in Hostname and name server configuration you have selected the box for Update name servers and search list by DHCP.

Cambridge, Ontario Installfest results

The Cambridge, Ontario, installfest has come and gone. Though the installfest was much quieter than the one which took place almost a year ago at The University of Waterloo, I would count it as a success.

I managed to install Debian/GNU Linux 3.0rc2 on a Compaq Contura notebook with the following specs (486DX100 16MB RAM, 700MB hard drive, no CD-ROM). I did a network install using http and ftp. Unfortunately there wasn't time to install the XFree86 packages, but I've worked on the machines before and successfully installed XFree86 3.3.6 on a similar box.

I'd like to thank John, from Netdirect, for the ride up and for pointing me in the right direction regarding my Lucent winmodem (I'll relate this in a subsequent post). I'd also like to thank Gary, Richard and Megan for organizing the event, and a special thanks to Shayne for the lift home - we'll get IceWM on there yet.

Lucent Winmodem success under SuSE 9.2-Professional

In a couple of other posts I mentioned that I was having some issues with my Lucent-based winmodem. The modem worked fine with the ltmodem driver installed, but only when, as root, I typed:

modprobe lt_modem
modprobe ltserial

Well, new kernels mean new things, and the days of /etc/modules.conf are gone. Under SuSE the same information goes in a file that resides in the /etc/modprobe.d/ directory. In a passing converation John from Netdirect mentioned modprobe.conf having replaced modules.conf - this lead me in the right direction.

If you cd /etc/modprobe.d/ you'll probably notice a few files that contain configuration information, i.e. sound, tv.

I simply created a file called modem in /etc/modprobe.d/ with the following information:

alias char-major-62 ltserial
alias /dev/tts/LT0 ltserial
alias /dev/modem ltserial

Note that this is slightly different that what's in the documentation, ltserial instead of lt_serial.

I hope this helps other Lucent winmodem users and users new to SuSE.

Modem users rejoice!

Dialup users finally have something to be happy about! As someone who has been using dialup for a long time I know the pain of trying to update a Linux system. Just 1 kernel-source update and you're online for days, even at 56K.

SuSE users now get a break, that break is known as "deltas." A delta is the difference between the version installed on your system and the current version available. Instead of downloading a huge file, you just download the delta and it gets applied.

To begin using deltas you have to enable it in your /etc/sysconfig/onlineupdate file. Open a xterm, su to root, and edit the onlineupdate file using your favourite editor. At the bottom set YOU_USE_DELTAS="yes" and you're good to go!

I managed to download ALL the updates for 9.2-Professional in one evening, kick butt for 56k.

Compiling a new kernel & a rpm tip

Compiling a kernel scares me. I've done it a few times, mostly in the day when I ran a less graphical system. But I undertook the task this evening with the hope of adding native kernel support for my Lucent winmodem. I followed each step outlined in the SuSE Administration guide but ended up with errors - so no luck. It looks to me like it might be an error in coding, but there's a conflict somewhere.

I thought reverting to older kernel source:
zcat /proc/config.gz .config

would solve my woes, but that didn't compile correctly either.

Tonight I'm going to check for new kernel updates and see if that solves the problem. Unfortunately on dialup it'll probably be all night downloading, c'est la vie.

Compiling the kernel has really peaked my curiosity because I tried the "hard" way, doing a make config (as opposed to make xconfig or make menuconfig), and I went through each and every potential driver (so many of them). There was support for some pretty neat stuff, radio cards, usb devices I wouldn't expect support for, touch screens, etc. It got me thinking about hacking kernels for specific projects (i.e. mp3 servers) It looks like it would be a good idea, especially for machines beyond the generic x86, (i.e. PIII Coppermine, AMD Athlons, etc).

And I came across a nice rpm (Redhat Package Manager) tip today while sifting through documentation

rpm -qf /path/to/file

the above command will show what package a file belongs to. For example

rpm -qf /boot/vmlinuz

shows the package belongs to the kernel packages.

Cheers