Archive for January, 2009

Jetway JBC110C91-230-B Product Review

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

I just picked up the Jetway ATOM 230 Mini-ITX

Jetway ITX Barebones w/ Laserjet 1200 for Scale

Jetway ITX Barebones w/ Laserjet 1200 for Scale

For specific issues in Linux click here.

Barebones machine from Newegg. I have to say, I love it. So far there are very few things I can complain about. Generally the case is a good size, there is plenty of extra room inside. The case is made out of a pretty sturdy metal that I was impressed by. It also comes with metal mounting bars that you can attach to the case if you want to screw it down somewhere. Airflow seems more than reasonable, I have yet felt the heatsink anything hotter than cool to the touch. Even when compiling Linux Kernel 2.6. If you’re looking for a barebones project box, you can’t beat the all in one deal with the power supply and the case.

The ATOM 230 isn’t a powerhouse by any means, but it’s fantastic for what it’s designed to do. Unlike the N270 that’s in my ASUS eee PC, the Atom 230 supports x86_64. It also feels a bit more powerful than it’s netbook cousin.Although it may lag behind a similarly powered Celeron 1.6 it is definitely bearable. Jetway and Newegg have a similar unit minus the PCI slots in the near and with the Dual Core ATOM 330. If you’re looking for some extra oomph I’d definitely recommend it. I only veered away from it because I needed the PCI slot, and I may be distributing these for a Not-For-Profit. As far using it as a router or a PBX, I can’t imagine there being any problems with it, but we’ll soon see.

Now I do have a few complaints. The PCI slot covers are nearly impossible to get out, when you do finally bend them out the case is warped, and then you find that normal PCI cards cause the slot cover to not sit right. It’s frustrating to say the least but with a little bit of bending, and one less screw the case closes cleanly without any problems.

Software-wise so far I have been having a nightmare trying to get it to work in Linux. I intend on building a Router/PBX out of it to replace the variety of other appliances I have. But so far I have had a lot of trouble with it. Gentoo seems to have a variety of strange troubles with the ICH7 southbridge. I couldn’t specifically diagnose the problem but I was having difficulty booting from CD as well as experiencing an issue where the drive would alternate between detecting as SCSI (/dev/sda)  and IDE (/dev/hdc). To get Gentoo to boot from the livecd I had to use the “nosound” boot option or else it would hang when trying to start the Audio module. I’m going to try CentOS derived Trixbox soon as I’m starting to get frustrated with Gentoo. I think I’m not compiling the proper drivers into the kernel and it’s causing the IDE interface to go wonky.

All and all, I’d definitely recommend this little guy. If you don’t need the PCI slots like I did, pick up it’s Single-Core or Dual-Core cousin with a smaller case. I don’t recommend it for Media, or emulation. Realistically it can do SDTV and SNES Emulation just fine, but for anything more intensive it might make sense to go with a full-powered processor.

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Sony PCG-6D1L Wireless Switch Location

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

If your on the phone right now with a customer, and you need to tell them where the wireless switch is on their Sony PCG-6D1L. Tell them to look on the Front Right Panel. There should be a switch labelled Off/On.

I couldn’t find this information when I googled it, so I had the customer find it, and tell me where it was.

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Trixbox Bought by Fonality, Where did the Knowledgebase go?

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

As any of you that have been following links to: http://help.trixbox.com/ lately may have realised. The entire Trixbox knowledge base and all of it’s rather important and helpful articles have disappeared. Furthermore, the whole thing has been rebranded to the Fonality Knowledgebase. Typically I wouldn’t complain, but it seems as if it’s been down for quite sometime, and I can’t access important things like “Minimum System Requirements for Trixbox”. and “Trixbox_Pro_Security”. I wouldn’t mind so much if it was a less important FAQ, but such fundamentals as locking down your new install is pretty serious. At first I thought that maybe Fonality would bring a professional finish to the Trixbox project, but my doubts are starting to grow. If they can’t keep the knowledgebase up without wiping the database, what other mistakes may they introduce into Trixbox?

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Hard Refresh a Page in Firefox on a Mac (Ctrl+F5)

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

If you’re reading this chances are you’ve probably already learned that Ctrl + F5 in Firefox  on Mac OSX opens the screen reader. Typically in most browsers Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer etcetera, Ctrl + F5 hard refreshes the page. Meaning that the browser does not read any of the information on the page from cache, instead it downloads everything fresh. The correct command to do a hard refresh in Firefox on a page (force the page to reload all data) is “Cmd (Apple) + Shift + R”. This only works on Firefox, not in Safari.

If you need to disable the screen reader press Ctrl + F5 again and it should turn off.

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How to remap a Short Circuited Key

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

Did you spill some water / coffee / soda / beer / vodka on your keyboard? Well chances are one or more of the keys are acting strangely. If  it’s an important key like a vowel letter, I think you may have no choice other than to get a new keyboard. Fortunately they’re not too expensive and not hard to replace…even for a laptop! (ebay) But what if it’s a not so often used key? Maybe it makes more sense to disable or reassign the damaged key rather than getting a new keyboard. A good buddy of mine Peter Althaus has this exact problem. His shorted key in question was the German Special Letter ß. Whenever he typed the Letter T, both T and ß would show up.

[5:47:13 PM] koolkarma says: now tßhe damn ß is ßtyping ißtself witßhoußt me pushing anytßhing.

The solution? Remap the key! We can remap the ß key to all zeros and disable the key in windows. There are a few ways of doing this. The cleanest way is using regedit, but it requires us to have the binary values for the keys we want to remap, unfortunately that’s not nearly as easy as using this clever app: SharpKeys

Make sure you have the Windows .NET 2.0 Framework Installed!

Once you do it’s a pretty quick process to disable or remap the key and fix your problem! Install .NET 2.0 and SharpKeys and open it up. This is what the first page looks like.

SharpKeys at Startup

SharpKeys at Startup

Go ahead and click add, here we can remap our keys around the way we want them.

Capturing a Key with SharpKeys

Capturing a Key with SharpKeys

If you click the “Type Key” button you can skip ahead of trying to find the key in the list. Sometimes the key may be too broken to be tapped, but if it isn’t, I definitely recommend this route.

When you’re all done press Okay, then press Write to Registry and reboot. I definitely recommend you both disable the bad key and assign it a replacement key at the same time. For example if your Right Shift Key is broken, disable it and reassign it to the Left Windows key all in one go. This way you can use the “Type Key” feature on both sides. Chances are between the Caps Lock, Left and Right Windows Key and other not so often used keys on the keyboard you’ll be able to find a new home for your damaged key.

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How to Tether an eee PC to an iPhone

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

Before I begin let me give you a disclaimer:

TETHERING YOUR IPHONE TO A COMPUTER IS AGAINST THE ATT TERMS OF SERVICE

DO NOT DO IT

JAILBREAKING YOUR IPHONE WILL END YOUR IPHONE’S WARRANTY

DO NOT DO IT

Before we get started let me explain some of the risks. Jail-breaking your iPhone can be dangerous, and it voids your warranty. Although I have never personally seen anyone ever brick their phone during Jail-breaking, it has happened. Balance the positives and negatives. Furthermore, using your iPhone as a modem is against your terms of service. In the past ATT has contacted users who have been discovered to have used their iPhone as a modem. Be careful. The “unlimited data plan”, in actually has a 5GB/month limit before ATT will call you to “reassess your needs”. If you do tether your iPhone to your eee PC or other laptop. Be prudent about usage, don’t abuse it, and if you do need a full time mobile modem, tethering is not a replacement, get an AirCard from ATT or Verizon.

With that said. Let’s get to the guide. The process is really quite easy.It essentially involves two steps, 1. Jail-breaking the iPhone and 2. installing the correct software. With that said, let’s get to step one.

Jail-breaking the iPhone:

There are already way too many much better guides on jail-breaking the iPhone out there. So I’m going to be quick and just provide you with the resources you need. You are going to need two things, QuickPwn and a copy of a clean iPhone firmware.

Between the two of these it will allow you to Jailbreak your iPhone in place without losing your settings, and will give you access to Installer.app and Cydia

Installing PdaNET:

Once you have Cydia on your iPhone springboard, use it to install PdaNET on your iPhone, and the PdaNET Desktop on your laptop. Furthermore, make sure you have iTunes installed on your eee PC.

Once you have both installed go ahead and restart the iPhone by holding down the power button and sliding it off. This can help with some issues.

Now go ahead and plug the iPhone USB cable into the phone and the laptop, open PdaNET on the iPhone and set it to USB Mode. On the Desktop, right click on the tray icon and click connect. Voilà, PdaNET will establish a PPP connection to the iPhone and you’re browsing the 3G network! You can also use WiFi using PdaNET, but I’ve found tethering to be much more reliable, and much easier on both eee PC and iPhone batteries.

I’ve found an interesting way to save on bandwidth and help with speed is to set my Firefox User Agent String to mimic an iPhone. The user agent is how websites know what kind of browser you are using. If you set Firefox to pretend to be an iPhone you will receive web-pages in the iPhone format. Very useful when trying to mitigate bandwidth usage. Here is a guide on how to do it.

Also I recommend that you find WAP versions of your favourite sites. These are websites that have specially formatted mobile versions. Although the 3G connection is plenty fast for most browsing I like to veer on the safe side.

Best of luck!

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eee PC 1000 Product Review and Windows XP Installation Guide

Friday, January 16th, 2009

I recently bought an eee PC 1000 the other day. So far I have to say I’m absolutely in love with it.  It’s a fantastic product.

Firstly I’d like to thank the eeeuser.com community for providing a wonderful place to share information. If it wasn’t for this wonderful resource I probably never would have managed to get my eee PC is a position where I’m very happy with it.

I purchased the Linux version which comes with a propreitary version of Xandros Linux on it. As much as I am a huge Linux fan I have to say I was a little disappointed. Although I would later find out that you could indeed get shell access to the Xandros Installation. After 5 hours of playing with the limited “Easy Mode”, I decided it was time to put eeeXubuntu on it. Turns out, support for the eee PC 1000’s hardware has not yet become available for eeeXubuntu. Meaning that out of the box I wasn’t able to access either the WiFi adapter or the Ethernet adapter. Rather than dealing with recompiling the kernel and modules for the adapters I realised that I was probably going to have to put Windows on it. As much as I may love Linux, I realise that Network Connectivity is more important.

I also found this SD Card on Newegg.com, it’s only 26$ shipped, and it’s 16GB. Obviously I’m not the first person who has thought of using an SD card to hot-swap Operating Systems as it actually has “Eee PC” in the product name. I’ve had it for a few days now and I love it. It’s a great way to experiment with alternative Operating Systems on the Eee without having to worry about overwriting your carefully configured Linux or Windows installation.

Installing Windows XP was a bitter harder than I hoped, but not terribly so. I’m obviously not the first person whose been through this and I was able to find able documentation on how to install WinXP on my eee. The easiest way to do it by far is to get a External USB enclosure and install straight from the WinXP CD. For those of who don’t have an external enclosure, or whose enclosure has burned up…. like me. You’ll have to copy Windows XP onto a USB Flash drive.  There are a number of guides out there that essentially use the same process, here is one. They walk you through the process of preparing your installation, and installing WinXP. Be certain to follow the instructions very closely, the process is very picky, ready carefully, don’t assume.

When all was said and done I had to go back and edit my NTLDR file. The flashdrive took the first drive position. Which is peculiar for installation media. I had to change Windows’ Position from:

multi(0)disk(1)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
to:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP Professional” /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

That fixed the problem.

It wasn’t a big deal, but it was a pain, because now my Windows installation Drive Letter is D:. It may not be the end of the world, but it is annoying. I’ve read that one can change the System Drive letter, but having tried in the past I know it can end in misery. I’ll deal with it for now. One of the first things I did was change the Temporary Files folder. This helps because although the read speed from the internal SSD drive is very high, the write speed at times seems deplorable. I’ve found that if I spread my writes across the drives it helps a lot.

Installing drivers was relatively painless, all of the windows drivers are available from ASUS Support. Make sure you install the ACPI driver first. Typically I don’t install a lot of these drivers because I assume they are just going to install some bloated branded software. THIS IS NOT THE CASE. The ACPI driver gives you the ability to turn on/off hardware to save your battery power. It’s a necessity on the eee PC as it has no dedicated WiFi on/off switch.

Once all the software is installed, I went ahead and did my usual customisations to reduce bloat. Disabling various themes, start-up programmes and customising applications to best take advantage of the tiny screen. All and all the eee PC way outperformed my expectations. It runs exceptionally well for it’s size and speed and the battery life is phenomonal. The price point of 399$ is unbeatable for the ultimate tiny computer.

The next step of course is tethering it to your iPhone which is coming up next.

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