Hardware

I recently came by a new Dell Inspiron 1525 that someone I know purchased. It originally came with Windows Vista Home Premium loaded from the factory, but the owner (like many others) preferred Windows XP Professional. With a little help from the links below, you can install all of the necessary drivers needed to get this laptop working with Windows XP!

First off, you'll need the SATA drivers on a USB floppy. There are other means of satisfying the Windows XP installer's lack of SATA drive support, but you're own your own past this link:
SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA AHCI Controller (rev 02)

Once XP is installed, I went straight for the wireless card driver:
Dell Wireless 1390 (Broadcom BCM 4311)

Windows Update has the Creative Labs Webcam (built in to the top of the screen) and the Marvell Yukon 88E8040 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller drivers. If you need the wired ethernet controller driver before the wireless, you can try the Marvell site and search for the Yukon family driver. It will have the driver, plus other utilities if you need support for things like 802.1q VLANs, etc.

Finish out the drivers, chipsets, and Dell hotkey support with:
SIGMATEL STAC 92XX C-Major HD Audio
Chipset
Conexant D330,HDA,MDC,v.92,modem
Touchpad
Intel GM965 (Video Card)
Dell Quickset
Ricoh R5C833 (Flash Drive controller)

This particular Dell Inspiron didn't have bluetooth installed (the BIOS showed no card, even though there was an LED for it), but if your's has the Dell Wireless 355 Bluetooth Module, you'll need the XP Downgrade patch to enable Bluetooth and then the actual Windows XP Driver

Recently, I obtained the new ASUS 701, aka the eeePC. I have the 4G model (512MB of RAM, with the camera). Everyone's first reaction is that it's small and that the keyboard suffers because of it. I don't have giant hands, but it is awkward to type on. It's the opposite extreme of the problem the Macbooks have with the keys being spaced apart. These keys are tiny and tightly packed. The screen is also a little small, but you really don't notice on anything but web surfing. Outside of that, everything is fast, due partly to the SSD (solid state drive). Boot times are as advertised (under 15 seconds). The battery life is average or as-expected. I almost expected more, but because of the small internal storage and being a portable device, the wireless network is usually on. Don't worry about the 900Mhz Celeron CPU or the small storage though. It's not really designed for replacing your primary PC. The small screen and storage defeats CPU intensive video tasks.

I read just about everything there is about replacing the included XandrOS with the "easy" user interface. I don't mind it. I actually enjoy it since it keeps me from trying to push this thing past what it's designed for. The more advanced things I would use it for are really sysadmin type remote access, which I painfully do on the command line. Now it'll be more painful with the small keyboard, but the portability and the short boot time outweigh that. The XandrOS uses IceWM and some custom UI stuff done by ASUS, making for more of a smartphone/PDA style experience when choosing your next application. However, once that's out of the way, the windows and controls look like your basic Windows XP and almost certainly intentional. Even updating the system software insists upon reboots after every install!

The first thing I noticed was that re-joining the wireless network is not automatic and it was a little confusing to have the two wireless icons in the system tray. One is really for wireless, the other is for network interfaces in general. Once that was out of the way, the "Add/Remove Programs" made sense. Nothing populates there unless you are online. Why? Well, it's more of a software update than an Add/Remove, so be sure to be online before running it. I ran it (January 18, 2008) and there were a few updates like Skype and the BIOS, which I did. You'll get a new application called EeeAP which is rumored to be for wireless mesh networking, but there's little on that. On that note however, there's checkboxes in all the right places for sharing your existing internet connection with others. This isn't always obvious on other distros.

I doubt I'll be replacing XandrOS with WinXP or some other Linux. First of all the SSD lifespan isn't the same as a spinning disk and I don't care to push it. Plus, Asus customized this OS to work with the hardware and I don't fear Linux. Strangely, they included Anti-Virus, but I think that's for more WinXP user cross-over hand-holding. I disabled it from startup, but I didn't remove it. Asus also included UnionFS for the root partition. This allows them to have a base image on a non-writeable partition. Any root partition changes are not made to the image, but to what's left of the SSD. You'll get 1.4G of useable drive. This non-traditional method means software updates use up the base image's space, plus the updated program takes up space. Software "removals" just kill a pointer to the base image, so you don't really free up any space at all. More than likely, it'll take up more space just to make that reference. Confusing? Not really. You just have to undertand that the drive available to you is really just keeping track of changes since a starting point.

On to more useful information! I did follow the ASUS eeePC wiki article on adding additional repositories. PLEASE do yourself a favor and listen to their suggestions on configuring "pinning". I didn't hose this system, but it's I've experienced it in other Linux adventures. Let the Asus "official" repositories win in a dependency battle. The http://xnv4.xandros.com/xs2.0/upkg-srv2 repository does not have a public key, which isn't well explained on the wiki. Just ignore the errors, don't forget to do a "sudo apt-get update" afterwards, and reboot. I didn't reboot and almost through the eeePC against a wall when fceultra kept segfaulting. After the reboot, everything was fine and Spy Hunter came right up :)

By the way, that's done via the command line. Press CTRL+ALT+T to get a shell. It's nothing to write home about. Just a basic shell. I did find it nice that krdc (the KDE client for remote desktop and VNC) are readily there. I configured a PPTP VPN client easily in the network configuration, but unfortunately has no options for custom routes (so not ALL of my traffic goes through the VPN like web surfing). Also, nslookup and dig and host are missing. I'm not sure why, but ping and traceroute resolve names too, so I used those.

I haven't done much else, but poking around in the Messenger app (which is just Pidgin) and the file manager, I'm amazed at how Windows XP-like they made this thing look. Again, I'm sure it's to make newbies feel comfortable. The system tray is a little over-populated (another XP-ism) and I really need to read more on making my own shortcuts. I could do without individual big-button shortcuts to each of the Google Apps, and replace them with krdc and the terminal.

I live in an area with frequent power outages. It's a limitation of the area I live in. If something happens near the entrance of our town, the whole town goes out. Needless to say, I have more than one UPS in the house to sustain the various electronics I run. Mostly, it's to support the VOIP phone service and the MythTV network in the house.

I own several of the Belkin F6C550VA-AVR UPSes and an APC 350VA Back-UPS ES. When the power goes out, all of them sing a horrid beeping chorus, usually in the early morning hours. At that hour, the family prefers to sleep it out and not be jarred awake to the noise. Also, I have to get up and silence them all. Worse, just before the battery is drained, they scream again and again, until finally dying. Use the software to silence them you say? Well, not all of them are attached to computers. Such is the case for the cordless phone and downstairs in the basement for the cable modem (also provides phone via VOIP) and the router.

I set out to kill the internal speaker. It was a little rough on the Belkin, but much easier on the APC:






First, take out the battery from the back of the unit. This is safer, plus the cover works as a place to put the screws.















Next, take out the two screws from the back.










Place the UPS on its side and use a flathead screwdriver to pop the plastic clip from the front cover off the bottom.



Now, put the UPS back upright and work the front cover off by lifting from the bottom up. Remove the two screws holding the left and right side of the UPS together.















Here comes the tricky part. Working the sides apart, remove the top panel (the part with the AC outlets). I popped the right side of the UPS off mostly, then pulled the top panel off the left side as it rested on the table.



See that little blue cylinder? That's what makes all the noise! I removed it by wedging a small flathead screwdriver under it. Working carefully in a circular motion, you can pop it right off the circuit board. Be careful not to crack the circuit board! Do the whole process backwards to put it back together. Now I can sleep!


This little APC was much easier:


First, flip it over, take off the battery cover and remove the battery. Then remove the five screws holding the back cover on.


Lift the back cover off and look for a little black cylinder. That's the speaker, but this one was a little harder to pry off the board because it was soldered closer to the board. I used a smaller flathead to be able to get under the speaker and I cracked it off in several tries. The picture below was taken after I removed the speaker, but you can still see the circle on the board where it used to be.