Geek White North

My wife saw a website that described how to take household items and embed them into models of other things.
An example of this is using split peas as rivets on the Dalek I made (Oh and that was her idea).

One day a while ago after a spaghetti and meatballs meal. She held up the empty plastic bottle of spaghetti sauce and said I am going to make something from this.
After some thought she said Steampunk K9.
Out came the glue gun and a bunch of other things and here is the final creation.

I spent the weekend updating and installing Linux on my workshop computer, amongst other things. I then turned to my EEEPC.

For a while I knew that somewhere along the way that my EEEBuntu installation was screwed up. I think that some upstream updates had come through that were not compatible with the EEE701. EEEBuntu seems to be moving away from ‘EEE’ and ‘Buntu’ and has changed its name to Aurora. Seems more ‘cloud-y’ to me and maybe not really what I want  (I will wait to see what people say).

I read some reviews, and Slitaz and Ubuntu Netbook Remix caught my attention, so I got my pendrive and loaded them up.

Slitaz was quite good but I am lazy and would need some time to get the wifi working. The thing is, whilst you can connect to the internet with ethernet you do need wifi with a netbook some of the time.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix to be honest seems like a vertical version of the ‘baby’ Xandros that came with the EEEPC701, except it also had some of the classic desktop available if you need it. The next step was to write to the internal memory card. That seemed to be easier this time around.

The one thing I find that is odd is that every time it starts up, it states that my battery is no good. I started looking for replacement batteries, since it is several years old now and it does seem plausible. However I had not seen the message prior to the install and the EEEPC and Slitaz did not mention anything about the battery. So I thought maybe I should test the battery life. I uplugged it and left it running. 2+ hours later I concluded that the battery life was reasonable for a computer that is this old.

Everything else  seems that it is working for me right now, so I will leave it for a while.

So six months had rolled around since my last install, it was a long weekend and the need to install a new variant of Linux came over me.

I felt it was time to update my workshop computer. It is an old Pentium 3 Dell Optiplex Gx something with 512Mb Ram but has a 250Gb drive that I added about a year or so ago (I bought the drive for my wife’s computer without checking the type first and then discovered I had bought IDE).

Of course that means about 232MB that are actually usable but it seems a shame to waste so much space on one distro again so I started by looking at live cd’s of what I thought were lightweight distros. The Dell has some sort of weird Intel video chipset that seems to screw up a lot of distributions.

I started by looking through my recent Linux format magazine disks and saw Mepis and Mint 9 Isadora. I downloaded PCLinuxOS2010  and, for a change, I thought I would check out BSD (or at least PCBSD). I had been reading a review and it peaked some interest.

PCLinuxOS had some video issues and I could not fix it while using the live disk so I rejected it. Mepis worked except for the same video issue but was fixable. Mint found the correct resolution straight away.

Mepis is predominantly KDE based and, to be honest, it was the nicest looking implementation (if that is the right way to describe it) of KDE 4 that I have seen. BSD took several goes to actually boot. The first failure was because the disk was corrupt. Then I had to play around a bit in the menus and ultimately install it to get it to work.

I decided I wanted to try to triple boot Mepis, Mint and BSD. I first installed Mepis and Mint and left a space for BSD, (about 70, 70 and 90GB split). BSD took just over an hour to install whilst Mint took just over 20 minutes. Mepis was about 5 minutes slower than Mint to install.

Mint and Mepis worked fine together and then at some point I clicked so BSD would overwrite grub. When I rebooted I had the menu for BSD, Mint and Mepis. The downside here is that the first time it did actually work, but when I rebooted the menu did not actually accept input. No matter what I pressed it just added a # character. BSD would take over another hour to install, just too much time to mess around if it then did not work, and so BSD was voted off the island.

I reinstalled Mepis and Mint together, 116GB each. This is where I got a chance to really look at Mepis. When it was on the live CD it seemed faster than once it was actually installed. It seemed pointless to keep Mepis when I could just put Mint (Gnome) on the disk and then install KDE as an option at boot up, so that is what I did I also installed (Mint XFCE) Well I have plenty of space.

I have had a quiet time recently. Instead of devouring books like there’s no tomorrow my wife has had her nose stuck in her new ebook reader and now she wants to give a review of it.
Review: Ectaco JetBook Lite
I had wanted an ebook reader for ages and between waiting for the perfect design to come along and not wanting to get sucked into anything proprietary, I finally settled on the Ectaco JetBook Lite. I say settled because it didn’t fulfill all my nitpicky design desires, but as I got it on sale for CAD$129 I figured it would do until something I liked better came along. However, after about three weeks of use, I could not be happier with it.
At about five by seven inches wide it is perfect for holding in my hand, not too heavy or too light. In fact, as this version runs on four AA batteries, the battery pack makes the whole thing nicely balanced to be held easily in the left hand, and the slide bar allows for one handed page turning, in both directions (there is also a button on the bottom for turning pages). The screen is LCD but is very easy to read for hours at a stretch. The slow page turns and ‘flash’ when you turn the page that you get with e-ink are not a problem here. There’s no wi-fi on this thing, so you have to load your books off your computer. And it doesn’t play MP3s, but who cares. That’s why you have an iPod. If I had to make any criticism at all, I wish it came some sort of cover to protect the screen so I could shove it into my purse. Or one of those rubber scuba suit things that people put on their iPhones.
While actual reading experience is, to me, far more important than getting the book onto the device, transferring files to and from is painless. The JetBook Lite comes preloaded with a ton of freebies, the cream of Project Gutenberg. Some of these I had already read (or in the case of the Sherlock Holmes, memorized) and others were not in my immediate must-read pile (CIA World Book?!). Since the computer recognises the JetBook Lite as just a USB drive, I was easily able to copy everything off, and replace it with books of my choice. As long as you keep the top folders, Books & Pictures, you can arrange the sub-folders anyway you want.
The JetBook Lite works with all sorts of file formats. I have tried txt, mobi, rtf & epub and they all work fine. I have had less luck with PDFs, but I admit haven’t spent the time to properly fiddle with them either. As I am still working my way through classics & freebies, I have not actually had to purchase a book yet, but since they seem to come as epub, hopefully I should be okay.
The JetBook Lite is perfect for anyone who wants to dip their toe in the ebook water. I was planning on keeping this until something better came along, but really, I can’t imagine what feature would get me to switch.

It took several hours to download the 4.2GB file, check the file and burn it to a DVD.
Installation was very similar to before except the screens looked older, and not quite as flashy.

The other difference I noticed is that I was given a choice to install Gnome, KDE or other. I chose to install Gnome.

The video card setup was quick.
First I was going to customize the desktop – I tried to enable Compiz fusion.
It popped up a message that moaned that my hardware configuration was not capable of running Compiz.
I ignored it and surfed the web for a while I noticed that the screen fonts were corrupted and looked odd like empty lines running through my text.

After some thought I went to the openSuSe website and with some digging I found an article that said for the HD3450 card it was recommended that I install the ATI drivers. I then found the one click install. Yes one click and it was installed.
This is where I held my breath because five months ago I did this with Linux Mint and it would not enable multi-display.
But OpenSUSE just worked. I identified the screens and found my screens were switched around so I moved the configuration around but after doing that and rebooting several times, a quick trip under the desk and switching the cables solved this.

Compiz now was now smiling and I could now zoom my window and flap my pages.

I installed the codecs and this time sound was working fine.

Next on the list was gPodder, a great podcatcher, and a newer version came with openSUSE. I really like the new features in gPodder

I was able to install Giver, a simple file sharing program that I use to pass files around over the internal network with other computers.

Finally my configuration was finished once I updated my user profile for Firefox and Thunderbird.

I’ve jumped in with both feet. I have my core utilities installed; now to explore YAST and the other features.

Around every 6 months I back up everything and look at updating my distro. My last update was in the summer when I tried updating Mint and ended up with Ubuntu.

Well, I heard on the Linux Outlaws Podcasts that some listeners said great things about openSUSE and how it just worked.
I got my Linux Format magazine and the cover disk had Mandriva 2010, Ubuntu 9.10 and openSUSE.

I had every intention of actually installing Ubuntu, but when I put the disk in the drive and ran the live version of Ubuntu I noticed that I had similar video issues to 6 months ago. I thought I’d have to go through that configuration again.
It did recognize the 2 Acer monitors attached but it did not indicate that it knew the videocard. I tried to use the configure display settings utility but with no luck.

I then thought to myself why not give the live version of openSUSE a try. The live version was KDE4.3.
Now it identified my video card as the ATI HD3450 without any help from me. It did not recognize the 2 Acer monitors. I was amazed that when I tried to use configure display settings. It worked!

So I tried installing from the live version. The installation is very similar to installing Mint or Ubuntu approx 20 minutes, but then it reboots and goes through an extra configuration stage.
An added plus was that it identified that I have 2 hard drives and that one is a Windows drive.
Mint and Ubuntu in the past have always needed some intervention to make sure it is going to the whole drive.

The negative was that the first time I installed it stopped half way through. I believe it may have been me knocking one of the buttons on my mouse and activating the highlighted button, which was abort.

After installation my first impression of KDE4.3 was that it was much nicer that the previous KDE4.x implementation that I had seen 6 months ago.

Then it happened – crash…Reinstall…crash… Reinstall. OK when you have just installed it is easier to reinstall because it is 20 minutes, whilst troubleshooting could be an hour. I did some reading and the live distros are only 686 versions and I only have 2GB Ram on this computer.
I like to watch podcasts so I need the codecs to play them. I downloaded the media packs. I now see the podcasts but with no sound. Bah!

Crash! I thought that perhaps the low memory and the 686 version combination may be making things unstable. I had come this far, I have everything backed up, OK so time to download the 586 version distro, give that a try.

We just got back from a road trip to Chicago.
The trip  felt short, but really geeky, because we were driving to a science fiction convention listing to podcasts about Linux! (Linux Outlaws – the donation will be in the mail soon.)

We went to the Chicago Tardis convention. One of the big guests of honor was Paul McGann aka the 8th Doctor. He seemed very laid back and thoughtful.

As always, there were long queues for photographs with props people had built.

In the main room there was a TARDIS on display and someone’s Dalek. The Dalek was kitted up with practically everything. It actually opened at the front and the shoulders spun 360 degrees. The chap who built it gave a short talk about it in one of the panels (which was so popular that there were people waiting in the room even before the start of the panel). He had fitted the eye stalk with a camera so it was easier to navigate around. Used in-line skate wheels and the shoulders looked to move quite smoothly. The whole thing was maneuverable by a wheel chair cart. He did a great job.

Continuing my search for a suitable Linux for a Dell 3800 Laptop…

So my first step was to add Internet to the computer. I found a Linksys laptop wi-fi card that I had bought from the local Factory Direct (a computer outlet store) a while ago and that was still floating around.

I have a lot of distros that I got from magazines and the first one I tried was a Google Geos distro. I think it’s based on Ubuntu. I put it in the drive and started it up. It started chugging and puffing, and after 20 minutes a background that reminded me of a snooker table (bright green) popped up, with a big flower in a pot. Then I started getting errors and everything slowed down to the point where it was quite painful to proceed.

Google has already announced that it was going to create it’s own operating system from the ground up, not surprising really.

Next

I thought I would go with an old favorite PCLOS. The latest had just been released and I thought I would give that a go. It was much more perky than the Google operating system. Everything seemed good. OK, so now to install the driver for the wi-fi and get online. Well, it knew which card I had but the problem was it wanted me to download it from within the setup (problem was, I still wasn’t on the internet yet).

Next

Puppy Linux …everyone loves Puppy. I loaded Puppy and it was quite playful but the drivers for the wi-fi card need to be downloaded (er, still not on the internet) and added using ndis wrapper.

Next

The next few distros I tried all seemed to have the similar issues, either they were slow, needed an Internet connection to download the drivers or used ndis wrapper.

And the winner is…

Vector Linux

Laziness crept in here as I stopped as soon as I found a distro that was able to set itself up. Vector Linux was able to configure the wifi card and load the driver with a minimal interaction from me. Winner, Winner.

Vector Linux is the first Slackware Linux I’ve tried and it is using XFCE. Now I just have to find a cool use for it.

Here are some pictures of my progress with the skull. It looks OK so far, but still has a long way to go.

A front view and side view.

I am still adding tweaks to the eye sockets, before adding the eyes. I have some wooden balls I got from the craft store which will be the eyes.

Then the nose needs some serious reshaping.

I roughed in, marked\painted the indentations.

The size and dimensions are based on the paper craft T800 endo model.

After spending a lot of July and August configuring computer monitors, I took a look in the workshop and felt I wanted to get back into building something that included microcontrollers.

Gort has had a road block since I pulled out his visor. I just have not been happy with the angle of the visor although I have tried all sorts of various ways of refitting the visor.

Bender, well it needs a lot of work.

After the Terminator 4 movie, I started thinking again about the endoskeleton. I have been tinkering with building an endo skull. I have got the basic shape. I am not pleased with the nose as it is a bit too bumpy, but it looks creepy and that is the point. I am going to continue on with it for a while but continue on Gort slowly. I will post pictures soon.