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Cisco 3500XL PSU Fix

This is just a proof of concept/quick hack; I’ve recently been given a dead Cisco 3500XL. Plug the power cable in and I got no action, no fans, no lights, etc.. Removed the lid and looked inside: The power cables appear to be the same colors as a molex connector, so just like the Dell 2600 Series Sata Mod I decided there’s nothing to lose by giving it a go. As normal, the yellow cable is 12V+, blacks are ground, and red is 5V. Short the ATX PSU’s Pin 14 to 15 (PS_ON and COM), then watch the magic happen. Yes it booted fine the first time, but after “cleaning up” the wiring, one of the cables must have come loose, hence the fault pic below. After properly checking the cables again, it booted fine… Read More »Cisco 3500XL PSU Fix

Plain Text Notifications On Orbiters

Intergrating third part programs into Linuxmce can be done a few different ways, this looks at a very simple method of sending notifications to all orbiters once an event occurs. In this test, we use Transmission, specifically Transmission-Daemon (a bit-torrent program), used for downloading ISO’s of different distro’s. The DVD sized Linux ISO’s take a while to download, so why not go watch some TV? Now that your busy doing something else away from your PC, you don’t want to have to keep looking to see if it’s finished, so why not send a notification to your orbiters/MD’s? You can either setup a Cron job to check for new files in a directory, and get it to send a message once a condition is met, or you can use Transmissions built-in “script-torrent-done-enabled” feature (available in… Read More »Plain Text Notifications On Orbiters

Linuxmce 10.04 Install

The newish beta of Linuxmce 10.04  (Lucid Lynx) has been out since early 2011. It was a forced upgrade because the support for 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) stopped. Yes 10.04 is still a few versions behind the most up-todate version (of Ubuntu), but it it the newest long term support release (LTS), meaning that it will have support for about 3 years, and 5 years on the server version (not used here). The first round of testing was done with VMware server, to answer simple questions like: Does it install well; By that, I mean does it install using the scripts provided (cut and paste), or does it require additional tweaking/conditions? A few attempts later,  over as many weeks and it’s seems to be going well with a small but major problem, the Grub2 boot loader has… Read More »Linuxmce 10.04 Install

N900 Orbiter

After a phone swap, I’ve been able to get my hands on an Nokia N900 *Touchscreen Mobile Computer* * = Nokia’s words not mine First order of busines: Can you put an orbiter on it: Yes – It’s marginaly slower than the XP Orbiter, which makes it a smoother feel, and less click and wait… (like the web/proxy orbiter). Does it come with a SIP client: Yes, and it also connects to Asterisk in Linuxmce to take advantage of the free calls included with my ADSL. Transmission Client available: No – havent tried everything yet, so migh be able to use a Java client or similar. So far it’s looking very good, some minor issues with the Orbiter, eg; when it goes black you have to tap the screen in the right place to get… Read More »N900 Orbiter