To Steve Meriweather:
Your reply address bounces:
168.251.196.68 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 Mailbox unavailable or access denied –
Giving up on 168.251.196.68.
I used 3/4″ Oak plywood for the sides and shelves except the top shelf, which is solid Oak. Material choice is up to you. If I remember right, I made the sides 11-1/4″ deep. You can change the depth to your preference.
2 3/4″x11-1/4″x3’8″ oak plywood sides
1 3/4″x11-1/4″x4’5-1/4″ oak plywood shelf
1 3/4″x12-3/4″x4’8″ oak top (glue up from 3 to 4 narrow pieces)
alternatively, make the top from plywood with oak edging.
The face-frame is 3/4″x4″, 3/4″x8″, and 3/4″x1-1/2″ material.
After installing Ubuntu 9.04 on my HP4325, I decided to try 9.10 on my DV9000 series laptop. I purchased a 320GB 7200 RPM Seagate hard drive and an external USB 2.0 enclosure, and copied the disk using Acronis 11. I had to do some manipulation to create partitions before the disk copy, and ended up re-doing the Ubuntu install to use the custom partitions that I wanted. By default Ubuntu wanted to re-partition the windows partition.
The AMD based DV9000’s use Broadcom 802.11g chips, so they have the same problem as I had with the HP4325. Installing the b43-fwcutter package worked perfectly.
Now I have both Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 available at boot time. Windows 7 is an improvement over Vista, but Ubuntu certainly boots and logs in quicker. If I can get all my browser an email settings copied over, I may be able to spend more time in Linux.
In the late 1990’s I swapped my headlight bulbs for Halogen bulbs. While this was an improvement, it wasn’t as good as it should have been, and I learned that the headlight switch wasn’t designed to handle that much current. I’m a computer engineer, so I really don’t have any excuse for putting off a relatively simple wiring project, but I did. Finally, on 11/1/09, I added relays per the excellent description at this page:
http://www.midnightdsigns.com/james/headlights.htm
Wow, what a difference! It doesn’t have the reflective range and focused beam that you get with modern headlamps, but its a huge improvement over what it was before.
I purchased my relays and sockets from All Electronics. The wires could be a bit heavier gauge on the sockets. Maybe the Parts Express sockets are better? Of course there are several commercial pre-wired alternatives at over $100 including one from Painless Performance, or like me you can do it yourself for under $20.
I do need to improve how I connect the hot lead to the battery at the starter relay — too many connections (also have the old MSD-6A hotwired) and it just looks sloppy. Since I’ve replaced the factory alternator with a single-wire internally regulated alternator, I can plug into the original alternator socket and hide some of this extra wiring.
I still have a 6-1/2 year old HP4325us Athlon XP laptop that, like a Timex watch, just keeps on ticking. Just for grins, I replaced the 4200RPM 40GB hard drive with a 160GB 5400RPM PATA drive (PATA laptop drives are rapidly fading from existence), and installed Ubuntu 9.04. Normally I’m more of a Red Hat Fedora user, but wanted to try Ubuntu to see what I thought about it, and to see if it could figure out the Broadcom based Linksys WPC54gs pcmcia card.
Using the custom partition manager on the Ubuntu install CD, I partitioned the disk as follows:
Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0006370b
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 14 10212 81923467+ 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 10213 19136 71682030 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 19137 19457 2578432+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris
The small boot partition really isn’t necessary by today’s standards, old habits die hard.
Hardware:
Output of /sbin/lspci:
00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device cab0 (rev 13)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc U1/A3 AGP Bridge [IGP 320M] (rev 01)
00:02.0 USB Controller: ALi Corporation USB 1.1 Controller (rev 03)
00:06.0 Multimedia audio controller: ALi Corporation M5451 PCI AC-Link Controller Audio Device (rev 02)
00:07.0 ISA bridge: ALi Corporation M1533 PCI to ISA Bridge [Aladdin IV]
00:08.0 Modem: ALi Corporation Intel 537 [M5457 AC-Link Modem]
00:0a.0 CardBus bridge: O2 Micro, Inc. OZ6912 Cardbus Controller
00:10.0 IDE interface: ALi Corporation M5229 IDE (rev c4)
00:11.0 Bridge: ALi Corporation M7101 PMU
00:12.0 Ethernet controller: National Semiconductor Corporation DP83815 (MacPhyter) Ethernet Controller
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Radeon Mobility U1
lspci -vnn output for the Linksys WPC54gs 802.11 wifi card
2:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller [14e4:4318] (rev 02)
Subsystem: Linksys Device [1737:0049]
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 64, IRQ 11
Memory at 44000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
Kernel driver in use: b43-pci-bridge
Kernel modules: ssb
The trick to get this to work is:
sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter
when you are asked in the installation dialog “Fetch and install firmware?” answer “Yes” (just press “Enter)
then reboot. A signal-strength icon should appear on the top menu bar, selecting that will allow you to select and configure your network.
I also installed wpasupplicant to deal with the wpa2 settings, but I’m not sure this was necessary.
Having used Red Hat variations for over a decade, I’m more accustomed to their notion of where configuration files belong. Ubuntu takes some time to adapt to from an administration standpoint. From a user’s standpoint, its easy to find and install a wide variety of free applications, and gnome and presumably KDE are pretty much the same no matter whether its Ubuntu or Fedora underneath.
I put the old hard drive into an external USB case and copied the old XP partition to the new one via:
dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=/dev/sda1 bs=4096
This took many, many, hours to copy 14GB of data via USB-1. The lack of USB-2.0 on this machine has always been my primary complaint. I never got the machine to boot XP properly this way, so I started over by using Acronis to copy the old disk to the new one first. Then I re-installed Ubuntu 9.04. Everything seems to work quite well, and it boots very quickly.
The “wall-wort” AC adapter on my 2-wire 2701HG-B AT&T DSL modem/router died after roughly 2 years. This was protected by a decent UPS, and a whole-house surge protector, so I don’t think lightning was an issue. AT&T was no help, they insisted the only option was to purchase a complete new gateway for $100 and the closest place to buy it was 30 miles away at Best-Buy. From what I’m reading, this is a very common problem and has been for several years. Although tech support wouldn’t suggest this, I found that AT&T does list a replacement on their web site through the dslreports forum on similar problems encountered with the 1701 model.
2Wire Power Supply for Models 1701HG, 2700HG, and 2701HG
Posters on the forum suggested that PSP power supplies are rated at 5V 2A and have exactly the same coax plug as the 2-wire unit. I found a gaming power adapter at Radio Shack for $14.99, which is working fine thus far. I’m not convinced it is good for continuous duty, so I’m ordering a heavier duty 5V supply from All Electronics (PS-537) as a backup (I can splice connectors), and have requested a replacement from 2-wire.
The replacement was shipped Monday 10/5/09 via FedEx.
The newer 2-wire modems do seem to have a re-designed “wall-wort” AC adapter. Maybe they finally recognized this reliability problem. However, the replacement they mail out is the old design – good for 2 years only.
