Archive for the ‘Personal ramblings’ Category

Ubuntu Headless installation (serialport)

Sunday, August 1st, 2010

I had to install ubuntu 10.04 server edition over the serialport. This is doable, but requires a keyboard to be attached and keys pressed blindly in the right sequence. Here is a little cookbook on what to press:

  1. Run a terminal client on the serial console device. Configure the serial port to either the failsafe 9600 n-8-1, Hardware Flow Control=NONE, or to the much speedier 115200 n-8-1, Hardware Flow Control=NONE. The latter should be used only if the serial port in both ends support this kind of speed.
  2. Boot the server with the ubuntu 10.04 server install media in the CD/DVD drive, or from a USB ke
  3. When it has booted into the installation menu (takes a couple of seconds), then do this
    • Press ‘Enter’ (for language selection)
    • Press ‘F6′ (Other Options)
    • Press ‘ESC’ (to close the Other Options Menu)
    • Press ‘Backspace’ 3 Times (to delete “– “)
    • Type ‘console=ttyS0,115200n8 — ‘
    • Press ‘Enter’
  4. Installation willl continue, ouputting the dialogs on the serial device.

You should ofcourse replace ttyS0 with another serial device, if applicable. I am at a loss as to why I have to do this in order for me to install Ubuntu Server 10.04 over the serial port in 2010!

Posted in Linux, Personal ramblings, Unix | No Comments »

How to use a broken IBM Thinkpad T43 for something useful using puppy linux.

Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

I recently got my hands on a IBM Thinkpad T43. Unfortunately it was broken. More specifically the connector between the mainboard and the harddrive had problems.

IBM T43 connector (broken)

I googled a bit and discovered, that this was a known problem. The laptop worked fine, if I put pressure on the right spot on the case of the Thinkpad. Otherwise it would not detect and/or spin up the harddrive. I tried to fix it by re-soldering the connector and using some two-component glue to fixate the connector. I did not succeed :-/

So then what? Throw out the laptop? Or? … I decided to make a project out of it.

A laptop without storage is useless. Due to the broken connector, I could not use a harddrive. I did not want to use a cdrom as it is a slow medium. That left me with a USB flash drive as the only option. It would be a clumsy solution just to plug a USB flash drive into the laptop and be done with it, so I chose to solder a USB flash directly onto the mainboard.

First I stripped a standard 1GB USB Flash from its case and detached the PCB from the USB connector using a soldering iron

Stripped USB flash

After that I soldered 5 wires onto the PCB of the laptop and used one of the holes in the PCB used for assembly as a pass through hole. I initially used 4 wires as the USB connector only had 4 pins, but that was not enough. More on that later.

Wires soldered onto mainboard

Having soldered the wires onto to the mainboard, I now needed to solder the other ends onto to the PCB of the USB flash. That went fairly smoothly

Wires soldered onto flash

Before powering on anything, I used a multimeter to check for bad solderjoins and shorts. I found neither.

Checking for shorts using digital multimeter

Luckily I had a Linux based rescue distribution installed on the USB flash drive, so I just booted that to see if the operation on the T43 was a success. As can be seen below it worked just fine. Well, sort of fine, but more on that in a moment.

Testbooting the flashdrive

Almost done now. I just needed to assemble the laptop again, leaving the USB Flash inside.

Ready to wrap up

Closing the lid on the laptop, securing all the screws I had myself a working IBM Thinkpad T43. Or so I thought. When I tested the laptop thoroughly I discovered that the kernel ring buffer was filled with

hub 2-0:1.0: over-current change on port 1
hub 2-0:1.0: over-current change on port 2

That cryptic message just states that the USB device is drawing more power than it is allowed to by the USB specification. Or more precisely that the port on the USB hub inside the laptop is delivering more power than it was supposed to. It first that puzzled me. Then I read about the USB connector and realized my fail. The 4 wires of the USB connector consists of  VCC, GND, Data+ and Data -. Given both VCC and GND was part of the 4 pins I only soldered 4 pins. After seeing the problems above, I investigated the matter and found a reference to OverCurrent (OC) protection on the header itself. I thus soldered the 5th pin and the problem went away.

I now had a working IBM Thinkpad T43 with 1GB of flash storage. What should I use it for? I decided to use it for puppy linux. Primarily for two reasons.

  1. It appeared to be tailor made for small harddrives
  2. I had never tried it before

I downloaded the 106MB large iso file and burned it onto a CDrom. Now I faced the problem of installing puppy linux onto my flash without using a cdrom drive (as I found the laptop without one). Puppy linux made it quite easy. Using another computer I booted the cdrom. Installed puppy onto a spare flash drive. Booted that flash drive in my IBM Thinkpad T43 and pressed “install” once more, installing it onto the “internal” flash drive.

Booted into puppy linux

All done. Actually it takes quite some time to boot the machine, but that is primarily due to the bios insisting on searching for a harddrive. Unfortunately the IBM BIOS lacks the option to stop it from doing that. After the system is loaded however, it is lightning fast. Way faster than my IBM Thinkpad T400. This is due to the fact that puppy linux loads everything into a ramdisk, so starting program does not require any moving parts to be ready. Programs starts instantaneously. The whole experience just proves (once more), that the computers of today is severely I/O limited, but hopefully SSD will change that real soon now(tm)

Posted in FUN Projects, Hardware Projects, Linux, Personal ramblings, Unix | 2 Comments »

Another take on no coke.

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

I have tried before. In 2004 I had a period of 1.5 year where I did not drink coke. I tried again in February 2008, but that did not last that long. Now I am at it again. I would really like to quit that habit. I have been drinking way too much coke during my (short) life and honestly I have to say that I am an coke addict. If I have to stop it has to be 110%. Drinking coke once in a while is not an option for me. I know myself well enough to realize that.

So, here we go again.

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Sjælland Rundt 2009

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

Sammen med en del andre fra mit arbejde kørte vi sjælland rundt d. 3. Juli 2009. Det var en hård tur. Set i bakspejlet skulle jeg have haft trænet noget mere. Næste gang er jeg bedre forberedt :-)

Posted in Personal ramblings, Unix, Work | No Comments »

Greylisting

Sunday, December 28th, 2008

An old topic …. really. But nevertheless the most effective way of dealing with the ever increasing amount of spam. If you have not enabled it on your mailsystem, do it. Today rather than tomorrow!

The reason for bringing it up is ofcourse that I came by a mailsetup where it wasn’t enabled. Place flooded with spam. Turning on greylisting reduced it to nil within minutes.

Posted in Personal ramblings, Unix | No Comments »

Here we go again…

Sunday, February 24th, 2008

From early 2004 I had 1.5 year where I did not drink coke. Mainly because of the sugar (teeth and my overall bodyweight)… That and the fact that I could not pass a coke vending machine without subconsciously thinking “I could really drink a cold coke right now”. Talk about addiction to coca cola :-)

Ofcourse I had to drink coke again to parties and stuff like that, and now I’m back at the “I could really drink a cold coke right now” situation. So here we go again. ….. my second try of getting rid of the habbit.

(I really know how people smoking feel :-/)

Posted in Personal ramblings | 1 Comment »

Goodbye to an old friend…..

Sunday, February 4th, 2007

I’ve made the descission not to play Battlefield 2 anymore. I do simply not have the time for it anymore. I didn’t have before either, but it seems that my days are running out of hours to use for fun activities while the list of fun activities to do in my life keeps growing. So goodbye old friend! It was fun while it lasted! BF1942 and BF2 has been a lot of fun and has improved my reaction time tremendously and made my eye-hand coordination really good!

It amounted to about 600 hours of online play spread over about 450 hours. As the game costed me EUR50 the fun/hour ratio is hard to beat. My stats

Velo (aka zensonic aka Thomas S. Iversen) out.

Posted in Personal ramblings | 1 Comment »

Sooo many things to do, so little time :-/

Saturday, January 20th, 2007

The first who invents timestretching will become filthy wealthy… Seriously I just realised that I have to many projects which I havn’t got the time to do. First of I would like to expand my knowledge of these computer languages:

  • ADA (never tried it)
  • COBOL (never tried it)
  • Java (java 1.5 is out. And I never got around to 1.4).
  • C# (I abruptly stopped my investigations of C# when I finished my thesis).
  • Ruby

And that was just from the top of my head. I seriously need to devote some time to learn those languages. And I have a list of books to read, and a list of places to see, as well as lists with music to hear, people to see, and  …..

 Life is truely wonderfull. All these great options. I can’t figure out why people can say that they are bored from time to time. I mean, just digg in. There is so many things to do and so little time :-)

Posted in Personal ramblings | 1 Comment »