Linux

Trust Scanner Success

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My girlfriend turned up this morning with her scanner, a Trust Flat Scan USB 19200. Its an old model from around 5-6 years ago, and she'd lost the driver disk. This was clearly a challenge for Linux …

I plugged the thing in (its a USB scanner, which pulls all its power from the USB bus) and the light went on. However the scanner application which comes with both PCLinuxOS and Ubuntu wouldn't start up. Time for some investigation. I got a root terminal shell and tried poking around

lsusb showed that the scanner was recognised.

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Ubuntu 7.10 to PCLinuxOS 2008

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I started a new project at a client's office a month or so ago. On the first day I turned up, and managed to work for about an hour, before my laptop died. Somewhat embarassing. I tried for about an hour to resuscitate it, but couldn't get it to boot at all: it just died and froze before the KDE login screen. It seemed to be some sort of graphical mishap, and no amount of fiddling with xorg.conf from rescue mode would fix it.

I excused myself, went back home and after some more fiddling, decided to backup and re-install. Having made this decision I was looking through my pile of install CDs, and I came across PCLinuxOS 2008, which I'd downloaded a few weeks previously, and I'd been meaning to try out. "So why not try it out on this laptop?" said the evil part of my brain — the same part which forces me to spend time on Facebook instead of working.

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More Power

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We're getting into summer in the Philippines, and I was just worrying how hot my Thinkpad R51e was running. Its 32 degrees in the room, and my CPU is running at a consistent 73 degrees, according to cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THM0/temperature which seems a bit unhealthy. My motherboard fried itself twice last year, and I figure that … Read more

Big Switch 6: Virtually there.

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OK a quick recap from my last post, where I realised that then next step was going to take some explaining … A week or so went by without incident and it was time to consider the final stage: moving Windows to a virtual machine and getting rid of the old Windows partition. Here are the main stages.

  1. Make a windows install CD from the install files on the windows partition (Thinkpads don’t have an install CD, they use an Install partition)
  2. Install vmware on Ubuntu and make a Windows Virtual Machine.
  3. Delete the old Windows and IBM Install partitions
  4. Re-arrange the remaining partitions to suit the new arrangement.

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