Thomas Laskowski's Blog

12 threads.  Very nice!

My friend from Poland came for a short visit.  He got a hold of an iPhone 3G for free from a family member.  I helped him to get it ready for when he goes back home.  It will work with his local SIM card.  Don’t they look nice?

I was very disappointed with the Acer netbooks.  They felt cheap and weren’t very OS X friendly.  I decided to shell out the extra cash and try a Lenovo (former IBM) netbook.  The difference is huge.  You can see and feel the quality all over.  It feels more durable and the keyboard on it is great.  It’s definitely worth paying a premium price for a better product.  Anyways, here is OS X 10.5.8 running on the Ideapad S12.

http://tlaskows.dyndns.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Picture-1.jpg

I found this around the house.  I think it’s one of my brother’s friends.  I am suspecting a dead hard drive.  With the hard drive in it powers on then screen goes blank.  When I take the hard drive out it tells me to check the HDD connection.  So I ordered a replacement hard drive and a power supply on eBay.  Hopefully I can make it work and install Rockbox on it.  At the least it will be useful as an external drive.

The website is up and running on the PII celery laptop.  I am slowly transferring the content from the old site to the new one.  It may take a few days.  Here’s a screenshot of a VNC session:

http://tlaskows.dyndns.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/craptop.png

Wow, this was a trip. It took me a good day to get it up and running. The first major issue was that the laptop had a power on password. I did some research and found out that you can bypass that on some Toshiba laptops with a special parallel port dongle. So the below took care of the password.

Another issue was that it was missing a hard drive. Luckily I had an old 40GB laptop hard drive lying around. It took some time to install it, but it was recognized properly.

Yet another issue was that the built in screen didn’t appear to work. Connecting an external screen solved that problem. I installed VNC on it so that I can control it from my desktop. The laptop will serve my website and it will be in the basement near the router. It has an NE2000 compatible PCMCIA network adaper which was recognized by Xubuntu.

The newest version of Xubuntu installed properly, however it refused to boot. It froze half way through the boot process. So I tried an older version, namely 8.04. That one seemed to work just fine.

Oh yeah, it was also missing the power adapter so I had to get one on Ebay for around $20. It’s up and running now and I just need to configure NFS so I can upload my website to it. Below are some more pictures and a video of it in action.

I wanted to see how long it takes for each OS to boot and until I can start surfing the web. The test was run on Ubuntu 9.04, Windows XP SP3, and Mac OS X 10.5.6 (iPC). Surprisingly, they all took around a minute until usable on the same hardware. Of course Windows XP doesn’t support the full 8 gigs of RAM that I have whereas Linux and OS X do. Watch the video below to see it in action.

I found a pretty good tutorial on how to do this here: http://michaelminn.com/linux/toshiba1910/

Unfortunately I couldn’t use his installation method because I didn’t have a hard drive large enough to hold all the installation files. I only had a 500MB HDD. When I tried to plug it into my desktop using 2.5″ to 3.5″ IDE adapter, the hard drive wasn’t recognized. What I did have was a spare PCMCIA ethernet adapter (ne2000 compatible) which the Slackware installation supported. I needed 4 floppy disks (the boot disk, root disk, PCMCIA disk, and network disk). I extracted the needed files on my desktop Ubuntu install and configured a NFS share. From there it was pretty straight forward. I selected only the packages that I needed. What do I need Python for? Lol. The installation took around half an hour. You can see the laptop running Slackware 7.1 below.