Old Hardware - Part 2

There were a couple of things to finish off before the Linux laptop was ready for use, solving the problem of storage and setting up an internet connection.

Storage was simple. The machine has a 20GB hard drive, of which 6GB had been partitioned to Linux. Once I had a working build, I lowered the Windows partition down to 10GB and created a new partition for scratch data storage.

I also had an HP Pavilion laptop that suffered from overheating. This was a widespread problem and HP patched the BIOS to keep the fan on. However, my machine broke with one of the common symptoms of the WiFi stopping. Incidentally as it was still under warranty HP were great about this and from shipping to return took only about 3 working days. Unfortunately, the underlying problem was still present and about 6 months later the video card broke.

At this point, the machine was out of warranty and I bought a new one (not HP). I did however have a perfectly good 250 GB hard drive. Amazon do pretty cheap 2.5in SATA to USB enclosures so I purchased one of these and got myself a 250GB USB drive.

The next step was to reformat the drive from NTFS to FAT32 so it could be used by Windows and Linux. Windows of course does not easily format FAT32 drives greater than 32GB but by good fortune the EaseUS partition master I used to partition the laptop also formats large drives to FAT32.

Secondly, the Wifi.

2002-era laptops likely didn't come with built in WiFi. Mine at least had a modem! At the time when I first got WiFi I installed a PCI card from BT. This didn't work after the default Lubuntu installation so I needed to set-up the card separately.

Instructions are widespread on the web. First, you need to discover the available PCI devices. The command to do this is:
lspci -vvnn | grep 14e4

From this I determined that the card was a Broadcom BCM4318.

Setting this up offline involves the following steps: 

As this is the b43 chipset install b43-fwcutter from the installation CD.

Next, download firmware files from http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o and http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2 and copy to home (you need to sudo cp)

 Run the following commands:

~$ tar xfvj broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2

~$ sudo b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o

~$ sudo b43-fwcutter --unsupported -w /lib/firmware broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver/wl_apsta_mimo.o

Finally restart the machine.

I now had a working Linux laptop with WiFi and 250 GB of storage available.

Rejuvenating old hardware

I have an old Packard Bell Easynote One laptop I bought way back in 2002 (it wasn't even cutting edge then). When XP started slowing down under  the weight of windows services it ended up hidden, like so many other old machines, in the back of a cupboard. I think the last straw was trying to install iTunes.

I'm not one to be happy with perfectly good hardware going to waste so I eventually decided to get back into the world of Linux and install a lightweight distro to see if the laptop could be of some use. In this case I decided on Lubuntu.

On firing it up I discovered that the CD-ROM drive had died. This ruled out installing from a boot CD. Fortunately though I have an external USB CD-ROM so I decided to go down the route of setting up a dual booting system.

First step was to repartition the hard drive. This is a paltry 20GB. (Plenty of phones with more these days!) Bearing in mind the intention was not to use XP, I spent some time deleting data and uninstalling everything I could from XP. I got down to about 10GB, I'm sure I can do better...

After this I installed the free Partition Master Home Edition from EaseUS and used it to create a new Partition of 6GB. Some more partitioning would happen later.

Next step was to setup Grub. This is a boot manager that can be used to boot multiple operating systems.

1. Create a new C:\boot folder, copy initrd.gz and vmlinuz from the Lubuntu distro
2. Download Grub4Dos and copy grldr to C:\ and menu.1st to C:\boot\grub
3. Edit menu.lst and add the following to the bottom
   title Ubuntu Installer (hd0,1)
   kernel (hd0,1)/boot/vmlinuz
   initrd (hd0,1)/boot/initrd.gz
   Note hd0,1 refers to the second partition on the hard disk, i.e. Windows (The first partition is hidden)
4. Edit boot.ini (set  attrib -a -r -s -h c:\boot.ini first). Add C:\grldr="Start GRUB"
5. Put the distro CD into the USB CD-ROM and restart, select Start GRUB and follow the instructions to install

And here it is back in use.

Small beginnings

We're now well into the 21st century and finally I've decided to start a blog.

What's it going to be about? Well I work in software development and technology is something I really love. This means that amongst other things I tinker around a bit in my spare time. Sometimes I even succeed in learning something or creating something cool.

Also, a fair few years ago I completed my PhD in Particle Physics. I spent a good part of that time working for the ZEUS experiment on the HERA accelerator in Hamburg. Of course the reasons why I loved Physics, and Science in general are still with me.

So I'm going to be writing about a fair few technical tips I've learnt over the years, mixed with some science stuff.

Finally, JSco? It's the name I now have at work - from a time when I worked in a team with lots of other Jonathans.  The name stuck and I like it!