Hardware

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Seeing as my Freecom DataTank conked out at the beginning of the year (I’m still waiting to acquire either an allen key or a hacksaw so I can crack open the enclosure and rescue the drives within), I bought a new hard drive last week. It’s a Western Digital My Book Essential 500GB, and was on special offer from Amazon (£55 – a bargain).

Hard drives do pretty much what they say on the tin, so there’s not much to say about it. It does its job very well. It’s quiet, small, and rather easy on the eye. In fact, as a measure of how small it is, here it is next to the Universal Size Comparator:

coke vs mybookThat little lozenge down the front is the access light, and I think it’s the only immediately-noticeable flaw. When the drive is on, it glows blue. When the drive is in sleep mode (which it automatically goes in to when the host computer sleeps, turns off, or when the drive has a long period of inactivity), it flashes once every five seconds. However, when the drive’s being accessed, it flashes the top and bottom segments on and off, like on a zebra crossing. Mine is on a shelf under the desk, so it’s not too much of an issue, but if you had it on your desk, I couldn’t help but imagine that it would be somewhat distracting.

Aside from that, there’s not much else to say. It uses passive cooling through the Morse Code-shaped holes on the top, back and underside, so it’s very quiet – the only time the noise is noticeable is when the drive is spinning up from sleep mode.

There are a few inconveniences: for example, the ridiculous power adapter. I’m not complaining that you have to plug in the UK-style plug yourself (in fact, that task is trivial) but it uses one of those stupid, wretched plugs that end up obscuring two sockets on an extension board that has more than one row. Why is it so difficult to design an alternate power adapter?

Also, I’ve had trouble trying to register it for service, due to the fact WD thinks it’s an internal drive based on the serial number. Of course, external hard drives are very reliable, provided they’re well looked after and are replaced after a year or two. (In fact, storage is so cheap there’s no excuse not to buy multiple external hard drives).

So… anyway. That’s the My Book Essential. It’s not particularly exciting, but it does the job. As a hard drive should.

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Lying about somewhere in my loft, I uncovered a Targa TS30AS laptop, from sometime in the early to mid 1990s. I’d thrown out the battery ages ago, and the machine is almost as old as me, so I had a certain nostalgia using the DOS/Windows 95 system that was installed on it.

Nevertheless, I wanted to see if it could be pushed a little further. The specs of this machine are laughable by today’s standards: 8miB of RAM, a ~75 or 100mHz CPU (a 486DX2) and a 500miB hard drive. This beast is ancient, without doubt.

Nevertheless, it fell well within the system requirements for version 1.1 buzz of Debian GNU/Linux. It has no network card, of course, so it had to be installed with a stack of floppies. An archive of this release for the i386 architecture is available here.

After some beating, I did get it to work. And, to demonstrate to the world how sad I am, here it is on video. If you turn the volume up really loud, then you can hear me doing some (slightly incorrect) narrative patter over the top, but if you want to cut to the meat of the scenario, skip to 1:46.

Despite the distribution’s age, the installer was relatively friendly. If you’ve been through an Ubuntu or Debian installation from the ‘alternate’ CD, you won’t have a problem with it at all.

The first act is to write the images to the disks. You need a floppy drive, and six floppies. The general command for writing images to floppies under Linux is dd, so, to write the boot image to a disk, use this command:

# dd if=boot1440.bin of=/dev/fd0

Don’t forget to (a) become root beforehand, using sudo or other means, and (b) check where your floppy drive actually is. As I understand it, USB floppies are a bit different, as they work more like USB mass storage devices. If the floppy is mounted, you’ll also have to unmount it beforehand.

Under Windows, a better solution might be RaWrite for Windows. Google is your friend here.

Very conveniently, along with the install disks there is an installation guide (PostScript, HTML).  Read that thoroughly beforehand. And it goes without saying that if you have important documents on your ancient PC (and why you would, I don’t know) then back ‘em up, because installing Debian 1.1 will hose your hard drive.

Software wise, there isn’t much installed on the machine. I am somewhat restricted by the fact that the machine has no CD-ROM or network card, and therefore can’t use dselect. At present, it has vi, man, fortune and joe installed on it – everything else comes from the base installation. In laymen’s terms, there is only the bare minimum of stuff on this system.

It is possible to split a package and then merge it back together again on the other side, but this takes ages, and I wouldn’t want to try installing a modern desktop environment like KDE or GNOME using this method. Debian 1.1 does have X11 in the repositories, but without any ‘modern’ window managers. Bottom line: if you’re afraid of the console, don’t do it.

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As I’ve discussed before, the Apple keyboard works with PCs, just like any bog-standard USB keyboard.

However, there are several elements of Macintosh keyboards that differ from normal PC keyboards, and they can be incredibly annoying. The Apple keyboard’s United Kingdom layout is closer to the International English and US English layouts, and this can be a major source of annoyance if, like me, you’re trying to use the keyboard to control a Windows machine.

With this in mind, I’ve created a keyboard layout for the UK Apple keyboard for Microsoft Windows using Microsoft’s brilliant keyboard layout creator. It covers the changes on the main keyboard area, but not outside the main alphanumeric block. That is, it doesn’t make the media, brightness, dashboard and Exposé keys work. However, it does swap the at sign (@) and the speech mark (“) around, and also swaps some other keys to mimic the Apple layout.

Get the installer here. Problems? Let me know.

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