Have Pidgin Beep at You Through the PC Speaker
This post will show you how to make Pidgin beep at you through your PC speaker when an event occurs. The PC speaker is NOT the speaker which plays music for you. It’s the speaker that makes a beep when your computer turns on or when you do something wrong in the terminal. There are a couple of different reasons why you might want to have Pidgin beep at you through the PC speaker instead of through your normal audio output device. Both of these scenarios have been applicable to me over the years. Scenario 1 : You want computer…Read the Rest
EEEPC Touchscreen with Ubuntu Mobile
Once upon a time An EeePC 701 was a brand new toy and I had big plans for a touchscreen hack with Ubuntu Mobile Edition. I ended up frying the touchscreen due to soldering the wrong spot, though I ran Ubuntu Mobile for some time. By now Ubuntu Mobile and the EeePC are several versions beyond what I had at the time. Now I have a non-touchscreen Thinkpad for my laptop and I use my EeePC as a relatively energy efficient home media server and Asterisk server. Since I’m not even using my EeePC as a laptop anymore, I’m not…Read the Rest
Ubuntu on an External USB harddrive
Goal Ubuntu on an external USB HD, which can be plugged in to any USB bootable computer (x86) and run. This entails: GRUB on the HDs MBR Hardware auto-detection at boot time Our setup I worked on this with a friend. We used: HP Compaq dc7600 computer Western Digital 80 GB USB laptop hard drive (bus powered) Ubuntu Edgy (6.10) Desktop install CD This page is OLD and probably contains errors, out of date information, security flaws or other problems. I am keeping it around because it might be helpful to someone. If you can believe it, back in the…Read the Rest
Creating a custom initrd.img
If Ubuntu installed, tries to boot, but fails, you probably are missing some important driver. To have a driver available at boot time, you’ll need to rebuild initrd.img. It’s a gzipped cpio file now, and this is how to build it on Ubuntu. Any tutorial that you find using ramfs or cramfs doesn’t apply to the Ubuntu initrd!
OldWorld Macintosh Computers
OldWorld Macs can only (easily) boot into Mac OS. We’ll create a 50 Meg Mac OS partition with Mac OS7 installed on it for this stage. The computer boots to Mac OS. From Mac OS, you run BootX which boots Linux from within Mac OS. Mac OS can’t see the Linux partitions, so you must place a copy of the Kernel and initrd (initial RAM disk) on the Mac partition.