lagerratrobe's blog

DSL on Thinkpad T43p

Working on getting some semblance of DSL running on my new IBM/Lenovo T43p Thinkpad. Goal is to have a Linux partition where /home and /opt are housed, but with DSL running in toram mode off of a Live CD. The challenge right now is to resize the existing NTFS partition and create a new one that is EXTFS2 formatted. It appears the tool to use for this is QTParted, for which there conveniently happens to be a MyDSL extension.

I'm seeing a great deal of inconsistency between how DSL 2.0, DSL 2.3 and Knoppix 3.9 recognize this machine. At the moment, my chief stumbling block appears to be that QTParted in DSL 2.3 doesn't appear to support the "resize" operation in NTFS. One has to wonder just how useful this utility is without that functionality. Back to the drawing board, and the DSL forum to see if there are clues there. May have to do this in Knoppix, but that has its own problems, as it does not recognize the drive as "hda1", but rather as "sda1".

Airlink AWLH 4030 pci wireless nic setup

Ok, now to cut the umbilical cord from the jukebox and get the wireless nic running. At $14.99 from Fry's, that Airlink nic has to be one of the best buys ever.

During some previous research on the web, I saw that the AWLH 4030 is supported by the Madwifi project. Just as I was about to go down the slippery slope of using CVS to obtain source code and then attempt to compile it, I saw a post from roberts saying that madwifi.dsl had been posted in the testing section. Ya Hoo!

Installed the package and ran madwifi_setup.sh, but had no joy. I'm not so sure why it didn't work for me, and truth be told after the first failure I went to the source and read the docs at: http://madwifi.org/wiki/UserDocs/FirstTimeHowTo Heres what ended up working for me:

DSL jukebox

Having received a Zen Micro for Christmas, I've fallen in love with long playlists and 500+ track random shuffles. And while the Zen can be connected to our home stereo, there's only 6gigs to play with, and it's not being backed up. Therefore I decided to make a DSL-based home jukebox from spare parts I've been collecting in the garage over the years.

The jukebox will be running on an old AMD-K62 350mghz homebuilt from circa 1999. I have 2 mismatched sticks of RAM which add up to 512MB RAM, and 2 mismatched HD's that add up to just over 7gigs of storage. Yes, that's not much more than the Zen has, but the Zen doesn't allow me to mount an extra 100gigs for $50 either. Enough intro, let's go!

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