Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546

Long time no update. Hopefully to clarify the ATI drivers situation, the ATI chipset in the laptop is a 128-bit PCI chipset; so theoretically the r128.o module would work, but it's only written to support AGP cards, which this laptop is not. a128.o loads fine, but agpgart.o does not. This means that currently you can't do hardware accelerated OpenGL with this laptop, and this won't change untl the ATI drivers are re-written to support PCI chipsets.

Got a few new things hooked up to the laptop. The SanDisk CompactFlash USB card reader uses the usb-storage.o driver and usually shows up as /dev/sda. If you do an 'fdisk -l /dev/sda', you should see the partitons of the CF card. Also got a Logitech Wingman Action gamepad working, it uses joydev.o along with all the USB stuff. I've been playing with MPlayer, a movie file player, it works good, but it's not 100% stable like movie players in those other operating systems. Almost makes me wish I had a TiBook with OS X.

Right now I'm doing a re-install (again) of Woody, because I upgraded to 2.4.18 many moons ago, but didn't like it and tried to take it back out. Backing out the 2.4.x kernel upgrade borked PCMCIA, which was working nicely, but at the time I was using an older version of VMware that didn't support 2.4.x kernels. The Fujitsu Extended warranty went through, so if I do something stupid again, I can pretty much get it fixed for free for the next 2 years, with the exception of the LCD panel.

PortaBoom

I've got SMB/Windows shares working from PortaBoom Control Center (PCC); I was able to mount a Samba share from my Samba server to a mount point in /mnt using the Perl::Tk tools I scripted. Very cool. I don't have a good idea of how long it will take me to finish the share code so I can mount NFS/SMB shares; local hard drive mounting will not be working for a bit, it's going to take a lot of work to do the right thing. The hardest thing is to get blocks of time big enough to tackle the problems that the share code has, which is why the next release is taking so long. I also broke the inittab in the boot floppy, so now only X starts and no shells on other consoles.

misc

Ice skating lessons are going well, I can tool around the ice rink now, I do still fall down. For those of you who randomly reading this, I live in San Diego, California, so ice rinks are not plentiful around here, if you grew up here as a kid chances are you didn't really see a lot of hockey. So you don't really learn about hockey and ice skating unless you watch a lot of TV, and I didn't. I've figured out why falling down bothers me more than when I was a kid, I'm about twice as tall as when I went ice skating last, so the falling down part is farther. I did manage to coax my mom to go ice skating last weekend, which was fun.

I bought an Atari 130XE 8-bit computer, and I've been playing with the atari800 emulator in Linux, and having a wonderful time. There's a cable and software called SIO2PC that you can use from a PC's serial port to your 8-bit Atari that makes the Atari think your PC is a floppy drive. The above SIO2PC link is a guy in Poland who makes cables and has links to all of the different versions (DOS/Windows/Linux) of SIO2PC software that you can use to get this up and running. I recommend him if you want to get a cable made, he makes excellent quality cables. I've not tested the whole setup yet, but it looks like this weekend will be a good chance to try it all out.