Tim
Posted a lot
Posts: 3,340
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I can't see how it will, Tim. XFCE is just an alternative desktop to gnome, I'm still running ubuntu underneath it all. Did you check the package manager for laptop-detect etc? Also, how old is the laptop (if the bios is pre 2000 you need the option apci-force in the kernel options to start it) and did you look for power control settings in the BIOS? i don't get laptop-detect in the package manager...but theres a few things in there that are supposed to provide laptop detection... ooh, edit.. just remembered something that happened to me last year - ubuntu 8.04 sometimes messes apci settings due to incompatability with some network cards. Does the lappy hibernate/suspend properly? Upgrade is the answer if it doesnt (to 9.04 at least if not 9.10) i'm on 9.10 anyway (karmic koala) PS, athough it won't help the power problem, xfce is worth a try... I like it more than gnome or KDE, and its quick and fairly lightweight. Yeah gonna give that a try. On an unrelated note, I cant get the fecking wireless to work either, but that doesnt help things :-)
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Another use for an eeePC... security camera. This evening, I installed motion camera utility and apache webserver on the eee, wrote some quick HTML and voila.. Live view of the kitchen, from upstairs (on a browser, via URL) ;D Motion also saves stills and mpeg video when it detects motion (who'd have guessed?) and can also make time lapse video. Useful app
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To get a standard A40 this low, you'd have to dig a hole to put it in
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chevazon
Posted a lot
1939 Chevrolet 2 door coupe, `67 `Zon estate, `87 Ragtop Cavalier, 4 x 800 Drifters,(!) 1500 Drifter
Posts: 2,259
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David Tennant ?
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To get a standard A40 this low, you'd have to dig a hole to put it in
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Done some more webcam playing today, I found a creative labs 1.3 megapixel USB cam in the box of random bits, plugged it in, it detects as /dev/video1 and works. (quick hint for buying cams for linux.. look for the "vista ready" sticker same universal standard for video, no messy XP-only software drivers) So, as I had to pop out, I clipped it to the passenger visor in the cortina and went for a drive (with motion running, logging 5 fps jpeg images @320x240) I've been playing with the output since I got back. The nice thing is that, rather than a pre-made movie I have a sequence of time stamped Jpeg files, so I could overlay (for example) speed, rpm, gps data etc over the pic. I can even set it to record constantly, but ditch anything over, say, 10 minutes old. That way you always have highest quality vid/pics of any incident/accident, but don't fill the drive up with useless road shots. Here's a vid I made (1 fps played at 10fps) to show the general concept.
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To get a standard A40 this low, you'd have to dig a hole to put it in
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oooooh i might have to borrow that, drop a microphone out the rear hatch inbetween the exhausts and make a short film the hills are alive with the sound of essex ;D ;D
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Someone just shot the elephant in the room.
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thanks for the "vista ready" tip, does that apply to everything or just usb stuff?
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Like your ideas, having built several PCs from scratch (and currently with a dual boot Windows7/SUSE setup) I totally get what you're trying to do. Good Luck mate. On a tangential theme, I'm a little shocked at how many XKCD fans there are on RR, I thought I was a freak!
Next thing you know there'll be Achewood references cropping up...
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thanks for the "vista ready" tip, does that apply to everything or just usb stuff? I think just USB (a lot of video cards don't have good opensource drivers...still!) but it means that ALL usb-video class devices just work everything from a webcam to a freeview digibox on a stick just mounts up automagically and goes.
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To get a standard A40 this low, you'd have to dig a hole to put it in
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Mar 15, 2010 19:00:24 GMT
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Why am I not surprised you have an Amiga.......:-) Have this pic anyway..mine.
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Apr 16, 2010 21:50:18 GMT
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Update time! Yeah, I know... a whole month since the last comment, and longer since I did anything useful here (well, it's sunny...) Well, I was at the tip the other day ditching some rubbish and I spotted an interesting looking thing (in a shopping trolley full of dead electricals) and picked it up for a look. Buffalo Linkstation is what it says on the front, back has power, 2 usb and ethernet (RJ45) .. I kinda had a feeling I'd heard of this thing before and that it may be useful (even if dead) so I asked the skip-minder how much. He looked at it and said £2, before adding "that's an old modem.. no use at all now everyone has broadband", so I agreed, gave him £2 and put it in the car. Anyway, later that day, at home... It's an ARM powered NAS linux box! I remembered the name from earlier in the thread (adding a serial port using a USB nokia lead) It has a 250gb HD (had a bootblock error, lol), can control a network printer and other USB stuff (and there is an opensource hackOS project too.. but for now it is a network drive to take the load off my over-full destop (4gb of 80 left) and eeePC (600mb of 8gb left) and allow file/printer sharing for the multitude of other wireless laptops in the house. All the movies and all the music are now accessible by anyone on the LAN. This revealed another problem (of course... nothing is ever simple, is it?) .. very slow wireless. First noticed when playing video from the Linkstation on the eeePC via wireless. Fine for a couple of seconds, then freeze, then repeat. Next, try a file transfer... oh dear. 75kB/s isn't very much at all It was about then that Mrs S and both kids tell me that "the internet" is slow like that too. Cabled is a different story. 10MB/s, much better. Tried googling, not much help. Lots of info suggesting that 802.11g wireless isn't quick enoough to stream video over, but mostly suggested by people trying to sell 802.11n, I decided in the end that my router is having trouble keeping up with doing 3 things at once (it's a rather old but dependable 3comm - good firewall, ADSL, low on memory and slow processor though), so I've dug up the netgear router I played with earlier (the one with the rubbish firewall) and added it as a wireless beacon (and wireless subnet DHCP server) and disabled the 3comm internal wireless. Result - watching video and transferring a 360Mb file at the same time (also as far away as possible with several brick walls in the way) transfer rate is up to 1.5Mb/s which is more than acceptable. Yay! (also yay, the whole job only cost me the £2 I gave the tip fella )
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To get a standard A40 this low, you'd have to dig a hole to put it in
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bargain, my whole house now is wireless must tweak it and set up some file servers, smb or nfs?
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Apr 17, 2010 11:20:33 GMT
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I just got an old laptop. Compaq Evo n115. Its needing some work. It don't boot up. The ebay man supplied a capacitor that had broken off. From the screen maybe? The screen don't stay still as the hinges move free. I was think of putting some foam between the screen and main part. In the gap, so that stops it flopping back.
Is there any good websites that actually tell you how to sort Laptops? I suppose theres computer forums. But they seem to be just about how to upgrade to the latest things.
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Apr 17, 2010 12:38:01 GMT
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TerraRoot - I been using smb.. I've tried NFS in the past, and wasn't too impressed (fussy, dropped packets, hard to set up) and I wanted a windows laptop to be able to share too. Rather surprisingly, it was easier to set up and connect the linux boxes to make a samba network than it was to make a vista laptop join the group and share properly.
Alecw35 there are no general "how to repair a laptop" pages that are worth reading, but here's a tip for you. Start in google, and put the make and model followed by a couple of keywords like "hacks","hacking", "dismantling","unboxing" "mods" etc. Sometimes you get nothing but reviews/sales but sometimes you hit lucky.
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To get a standard A40 this low, you'd have to dig a hole to put it in
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Apr 29, 2010 22:11:49 GMT
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Today's update... lotsa computer related things done! First.. more playing with the network infrastructure. I've moved the 3comm router, the linkstation and the printer into the cupboard under the stairs and run a cat5 cable upstairs to the netgear router in the bedroom. Previously everything was balanced on the shelves/record player etc and a bit messy and noisy (and the broadband had to make it's way through 20-odd year old phone extention wiring, so we got frequent hangups/dropouts and poor bandwidth). Now the bedroom is tidier and quieter and we get steady connection@6Mb/s. Second.. I'm building a netbook for Conor. He's not the most gentle (or patient) person in the world.. so things need to be a bit bombproof! He already destroyed an acer aspire 1 in just over a year, and 4 2 1/2" SATA2 hard drives have "died" at his hands too. It gets expensive...lol. So, I have here a toshiba NB200 laptop (It's the same as a HP omnibook, and a nice sturdy thing) that is getting Linux mint 8 (with some tweaks) and a nifty trick for the drive. I've bought a couple of adapters on ebay (for about £2.50 each) that turn a Compact Flash card into a SATA2 SSD ;D I have some 16gb cards, makes for a cheap, easily replaced, hard to damage hard drive ;D 16gb should be plenty too.. I never understood why manufacturers feel the need to fit a netbook with a 160gb drive, I mean, what are you putting on it? Extra bonus (hopefully) of longer battery life too. I'll post more when the bits arrive. Third.. I broke my bluetooth adapter the £3.95 ebay one.. it just fell to bits, and even put back together it now drops connection if you knock it (total pita if you use it in car to interface the GPS ) Also it is tiny and I keep losing it, lol. So, I had a brainwave, then got the soldering iron out. Take one cheapo 4 way USB hub, and a broken bluetooth adapter (small thing in the middle of the pic) Remove one USB socket, hardwire the bluetooth board in it's place Bing! one 3 way USB hub with bluetooth! In an extra bit of genius, I plugged the hole from the vacant socket with a USB miniB cable, connected only to power and ground, which is exactly what the GPS needs to charge from.
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To get a standard A40 this low, you'd have to dig a hole to put it in
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Apr 30, 2010 21:35:48 GMT
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It works too! I popped to the tip this evening (cleared out the shed in the yard...) GPS working perfectly, and the hub means I can keep camera/diagnostic interface plugs away from the eeePC (much tidier.. plus my startup scripts work better now everything plugs/unplugs at once) Anyway, I've recorded video and GPS info, the eee is doing a perfect job of collecting and storing everything onto a SD card. I'm playing at the moment figuring a way of overlaying the GPS data onto the video frames, and it's interesting stuff. Even without engine specifics (no OBD or megasquirt on the mk2 ) I have plenty just from the GPS, gives me position, altitude, bearing, speed and time so I can work out acceleration, lateral G etc using Newton (Issac not antivirus, lol), its just a question of building an overlay to place over the pictures before building a movie out of it with ffmpeg. Probably a nice toy for trackdays rather than road use, depends how interesting your driving is.. (I have already spotted that I hit 88mph at one point on the way to the tip.. don't seem to be in 1955 though. better check the flux capacitor next)
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To get a standard A40 this low, you'd have to dig a hole to put it in
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I've been having some laptop fun too, gave one to my brother to use away in canada, it's dies a week before he goes so i give him my good linux laptop and I'm laptopless, so the word goes out and I get four more dead laptops, two of them are over a decade old. The best one I've been playing with all morning, first I tried to install puppy linux on the fat32 hard drive with syslinux and a frugal install, that back fired (should not have done it at 2am) and it won't boot usb wont read a cdrom (changed it all ready no idea why it wont work) hasn't got wireless don't wanna sit in the cupboard with the hub and a short network cable so that leaves me with using ...... a floppy! where the hell do you even find them these days? what colour should i paint it?
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A floppy? pmsl..... I havn't used one since I was running an amiga regularly! If it helps I found a pack of (circa 1997) escomm 1.44Mb floppys in the shed yesterday. My personal recommendation with the laptop is to mount the drive up to your desktop PC and format that sucka to fat3 Anyway.. linux and wireless... all I can say is if you have problems, make sure you have the latest version FIRST.. Conor's NB200 for example. Wireless doens't work as standard under mint 7 but you can do a kernel patch to make it work.. (for about half an hour.. then it crashes and wont work without either a mod unload/load or a restart. (NOT good for conor. that sort of behavour=pulvirized laptop) I spent a while trying to fix, then just started again with mint 8 (7 is ubuntu 9.04, 8 is 9.10) and it just works....
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To get a standard A40 this low, you'd have to dig a hole to put it in
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rtlkyuubi
Posted a lot
Low and Slow
Posts: 2,922
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Hey SOC great thread! Shame I don't understand most if it! haha ;D Anyway, I'm wanting to put a computer in my car, Ive got an old laptop and an infra red usb remote so far. And since the screen is broke on the laptop I'm going to buy a little in car monitor and a power inverter to run it all. I would want to make it into a media centre, that can connect to my network and be able to run some satnav software. What would the best operating system to use?
Also with this usb remote, 90% of the buttons do what their supposed to but, ones like the open music player doesnt (which would be handy so I can use it to play music untill I get a monitor) Is their a way that I can reprogram the buttons to open different programs?
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