Stephens’ Blog

On my wonderful HP Compaq 2133 laptop the issue still lies where the sound card is not recognised properly which mean on microphone and a nasty bug with the inputting of a set of headphones in to it’s jack would not result in the speakers muting. Now it wasn’t really an issue for me as such as I didn’t really use the headphone socket or have needed to use the microphones on it. Now thanks to the developers at the alsa-project and the people using ubuntu and contributing to the forum this issue seems to have now been fixed well at least until the next kernel update. To get this sound card working the way it should go the alsa project download page http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Download, download the alsa-driver-1.0.17rc3 and follow the instructions on this ubuntu support forum topic http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=749693&page=14. Now although I haven’t tested this to see it work I am very confident as I have done all of the other instructions and got the wireless card working the graphics working better than just using the standard system. I shall be trying the instruction out tonight and shall let you know how it goes.
Also since I last posted I manage to kill an ipod nano 3rd generation by performing a simple firmware update. The ipod was just showing the apple logo. Now this happened at 22:30 one night and whilst trying to fix it the time got later and later until around 00:30 I decided to give up for the night. I then proceeded to fix it the next day but following the instructions from this article I found the night before and didn’t read properly http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1399?viewlocale=en_US. Now if I had bothered to read this properly that night I would have had it fixed within 20 minutes instead of wasting at least 2 hours. I always forget to read all the instructions before attempting to repair anything.

Well I have had this sub notebook for almost a week now and I must say that the device is great but shame about the OS variant choice. I have spent sometime today installing a different variant. This laptop comes with SUSe preinstalled and for a play it was great but when I wanted to install pidgin so I could chat with my friends on a more up-to-date client. well no rpms on the web or in the SUSe YaST repositories so I downloaded the source. It has been many years since I have had to download source and compile the program I want to use and boy was it painful. No gcc installed and then when I find cpp that would create executables files so off to find gcc, I managed that on the SUSe repositories for SLED 10 SP1 but as I installed that is removed x-org server. So that how my laptop stayed for ast night while a download and burnt the latest .iso of ubuntu 8.04. I connected a USB CDROM and inserted the CD and bang I now have a linux laptop again with working bluetooth and pidgin installed by default unlike the SUSe installation. So now I can see what the laptop can really do. If anyone else wants to install ubuntu on this model of laptop I suggest read this forum topic as it has lots of helpful pointers http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=749693&page=1

When I saw this sub notebook on The Register I throught WOW I must get one so I have ask for money for my Birthday which I know isn’t until the 25th of this month and managed to order one. The unit arrived yesterday and it is tiny but solidly made. so far I have found it great the screen is awesome at 8.9 inches and has a glossy finish. So far I have had issues with the bluetooth not connecting to my Sony Ericsson W960i but I shall get that resolved over the next couple of evening. I got the SUSe Linux version cause frankly if you sat Windows Vista on the machine it would be thrown out of a window due to frustration of having to wait for the bloody thing to start. I shall write a small note on how I got the bluetooth issue sorted.

I know I promised you a entry last week regarding the HP Lights-Out management processor and here it is a little on the late side.

Before I start I must say this may not and most likely isn’t the correct way to do things but I have found that they do work.

To active an select or advanced evaluation license

• I spent two days on the phone with HP and we came up with nothing so I decided to plug one the network cards into the network to see what would happen if I type in the activation license again and to may surprise and great joy it worked.

If the virtual KVM doesn’t load

• I found that if you try and use JRE1.6 (Jave runtime environment) you get errors as it is missing some components. The easiest way around this problem was to downgrade (uninstall and install) JRE1.5 which seems to do the trick.

After the I had worked out these problems I managed to mount my CDROM on my local machine to the server across the networkand install windows on the server without leaving my desk.

That is all I have found so far and this is only lo100i cards not the vasily more impressive ilo2 cards

When I find out some more I shall add it in another post and please let me know if you find any of this useful

On other things I entered a closed super draft Magic: The Gathering tournament using the time spiral set. I was given a sealed deck and 3 boosters in draft rules you take 2 cards out of the booster and pass the remaining cards to the person sat next to you can so on until there are no cards left. you still end up with 15 cards from the booster packs and you can select the some nice cards in the other booster rather than use pick possible 8 cards from your booster you can use and wasting the rest. In the tournament the starting round was round robin with two groups with the top two from each group go into the final.

I didn’t make it into the semi with a rubbish performance of won 1 – drew 1 and lost 3, but I had a good night and would love to do it again.

the next time I should perform alot better.

I shall write more next week about something

Well I have decided to complete wipe this site clean yet again. So it is another blank page. I have been at my new job for the last 3 weeks and can say I am completely enjoying the challenge of a new position.

So far I have been show off Lights Out of the DL140 G3 machine I have been building. These machines use lo100i cards which are cut down versions of the ilo cards but they seem equaly impressive. I shall create a post of all the problems I have encountered and I how I go around them so other people need not go through the same pain I have trying to get them to work.

I have also started playing Magic the Gathering in one tornament, I really sucked and lost all my matches and relaised that just playing a stock deck is not a good idea so I will attempting to improve my deck so I can actually win some matches.

That is all I have been doing in the last 3 weeks bar iceskating which I am trying to learn the icehockey stop with a little bit of success.

I am off now to spend an evening with my wife. I shall write about the HP lights out sometime next week.