Category: Computer

New Computer Specs/Wish List

I have been doing a lot of research over the past couple of days, and I have some of the final specifications for my new computer all sorted out!

Processor: AMD 64 X2 3800+ – About £40

Motherboard: MSI K9N SLI-2F – £44.25
Its a motherboard using the NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI chipset

Memory: Corsair 2GB PC2-6400 XMS2 (2x1GB) – £49.99
Its just 2GB of memory!

Graphics card: ATi Radeon X1950 PRO 256MB PCI-Express – £69.95
I know it’s not top of the line, but it is going to be way more powerful than what I have at the moment, and what I will b using it for!

Total: £204.19
The price doesn’t include a Hard drive, PSU, CPU cooler, case, or an optical drive (DVD/CD drive), but it is the base system, and gives me an idea of how much it will all come to!

I am stuck on what case to get, I could do with one that puts the motherboard on the opposite side of the, which would mean the motherboard is upside-down!
This is because the computer will be sitting on my right, and the left side (looking at the computer) will be up against the side of the desk
At the very least I don’t want any vents or cooling fans on the left side!

The missing components for my computer will be:

  1. A 200GB SATA hard drive – About £30
  2. A 450W – 500W PSU – About £50
  3. A combo DVDRW and CD-RW SATA drive – About £20
  4. CPU Cooler – About £20
  5. Case – About £50

Total: £170

Total1: £204.19
Total2: £170.00
Total: £374.19
VAT @ 17.5%: £65.48
Total: £439.67

Nearly £450 for a computer, some of the figures are estimates, but post and packaging hasn’t been added to the total, so it could be more!
I don’t think the specifications for the computer are that bad, it will mainly only be used for web browsing, and general home use, I wont be playing games on it!

One thing that is on my wish list that I haven’t added is a TV card, but I’ll add that at a later date!

I will create a separate post when I get more details on pricing for the other components

Until then,
Bye

The prices for the above were taken from the Aria website

Whoops! My mistake!

Whoops, I made a mistake! I brought the wrong memory for my mini server. I brought the Corsair 1GB PC3200 Value Select (2x512MB) memory from Aria, but I should of brought the Kingston 256MB PC133 168 Pin SDRAM CL3!

I’ve brought the right one now, I got it from Amazon, and its the low profile one, so its the same as the one I have at the moment!

I’m going to keep hold of the memory I have for the time being! It might go into my new computer!

In this post I was going to write my specifications for my new computer, but I don’t have any time to as I’m going around my girlfriends in a little while, so I’m going to leave that to a separate post, hopefully tomorrow!

Till then
See you!

I didn’t decide to stay on holiday!

I should start this with a link to my holiday photos on flickr.
I know that its been over a month since i got back off holiday, and i haven’t posted anything on my blog!
But I’m going to now!

I was going to start this post with details of our holiday, but I’ll now leave that for another post!

What has caused the long delay on posting? I don’t know really, but I think its time!
Ive been busy at work, and when I’m not at work I’m with my girlfriend, and I just don’t seem to have the time left to do anything else!
But I have managed to build myself a second computer! I am going to be using as a file-cum-web-cum-print-server.

A couple of years ago I brought a Via EPIA Mini-ITX motherboard from www.mini-itx.com which I was intending to put inside my old radio alarm clock.
I did put it inside the radio alarm clock, but I never got around to actually installing an operating system onto it, and ever using it, so its been sat on my desk gathering dust.

I’ve been wanting to change my main computer for something a little faster, and I thought now would be a good time to do something with the little computer!
So I brought a case, installed Fedora 7 onto it, and now I’m just trying to get file sharing going between it and an aging Intel Celeron (333MHz) via wireless, and two other relatively old computers (both AMD’s, a K6 500MHz and an Athlon 850MHz)

I’ve just brought 1Gb of memory for it, as when I initially got i, I only brought 256Mb for it!

I’ve already got the web server running, and webmin, now I just need to install the printer, and its practically done!

I’m typing this post up using the new computer!

I’ll post more details soon!
Until next time!
Bye!

Edit: I’ve fixed the type of my Mini-ITX motherboard to a VIA EPIA series motherboard, and I have updated the link to point to the correct url (http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/mainboards/motherboards.jsp?motherboard_id=21)

Room 101!

Well, Ok, not room 101, more like post 101! Lol!
I cant believe that its been more than a month since my last post, doesn’t time fly!?!

Since my last post there has been a few things happen, some I had thought about posting about, but I just haven’t been able to get the time!

The nights are now drawing in, and the past few days has been sunny, unlike May and June!

I am now on a three week rolling rota at work, I am now working one in every three weekends.
Staying with work, one of the warehouse colleagues is cutting back his hours, and I’m taking over his Tuesdays, and will be bringing in deliveries!

Me and my girlfriend are still together, and on Sunday we go off on holiday to Jersey for a week. We will be camping. Its my first holiday on my own, and my girlfriends first out of the country!

One of my other less known websites http://linux.roganty.co.uk/ is being worked on. And I have nearly completed it. I just need to tidy it up, and make it more presentable

The spam count has reached 7,800. That’s 2,800 in just over a month! Thank you Akismet!

I think that’s it, for this post!
And hopefully not for another month!

Sunny Saturday Evening

Well its now Saturday, and I am 22, so that makes this the first post of my 22nd year 🙂 And the second post this week lol!

Thursday went off well, it was nice and sunny when I woke up and it stayed that way all day, in fact I cant remember a year were it has not been sunny on my birthday!

I got a bookcase from my parents, I didn’t know what I wanted for my birthday, so that all I got, and £60!
From my sister I got a pack of beer, and £22!
From my girlfriend I got an MP3 player, a USB aquarium, and two Mr Bean cartoon DVD’s number 1 and 4!

The trip to the zoo lasted all day! We got there about 11:30 am and left just before 5:30 pm
We walked around every where, and I’ve got 59 photos to prove it!

On Friday we went to Cheddar Gorge

The day started off overcast, but it cleared about 2pm
We started off walking up and down the road looking in all the shops then we started walking up the road through the gorge.
Some where up that road we found a path up the hill side so we walked back along the top and back into Cheddar.
We got back to Cheddar about 5:15 pm, and we were walking for about 2 hours!
I’ve also got some photos from Cheddar, mainly of the views on our walk!

I’ve just opened a Flickr account so I’ll upload most of the photos there.
I’ve started with some of the other 200 odd photos I’ve got on my computer.
At the moment I’ve got some of the nicer close ups uploaded, but I will upload more.

Its Saturday evening and Bristol Rovers and Bristol City have both won their matches, and me and my girlfriend are now going out for some dinner!

Till next time.

Siemens, Moto4Lin and Linux

This post is now two weeks late, so I am posting it for historical purposes
As to the story of connecting my phone to my computer is getting along, it is no further, I found the XMPM software that Siemens provided for Linux computers, and I have had come lights flashing on the cable, so there is hope!

Alright, I nearly got it working.From my installation of moto4lin, I nearly got some progress!

In the preference dialog box I set the ACM Device as /dev/ttyUSB0 and then clicked on “Update List” and the phone shows up, sort of!

Its got an AT Vendor ID of 067b, and AT Product ID of 2303, but there is no manufacturer, or product shown in the list.

If I select “Set as AT Device” then “Ok”, and then in the main window click on “Connect/Disconnect”

The display window displays

[info] AT phone found
[info] Switching device /dev/ttyUSB0 to P2K mode…
[error] Unable to connect

So it can see then phone, but then it tries to change to P2K mode which is where is all falls down!

As for gammu. I reinstalled it, changed the config file to point to /dv/ttyUSB0 and changed the model and connection to “at”

At the command line “gammu –identify” doesn’t do anything!

It looks like its busy doing something, but nothing comes up on the screen

Quick Post

With reference to my last post about posting an update on how connecting my Siemens mobile phone to my Linux computer is going.

I have not forgotten about it, I started typing it up Sunday morning, but then had to go off to work so I was unable to complete it. This has been the first time this week that I have been able to get onto my computer, and even then I’m off to work in 5 minutes!

I booted my PC into XP and connected my phone, and it is working, so the phone is not at fault.

I’m going to try again with Linux, I have not given up any hope at all!

In fact it was with XP that I downloaded the Lnux version of Mobile Phone Manager from Siemens, so I’m going to transfer the files to a partition that is mounted under Linux and try that.

Got to go.

Mounting Siemens Phone on Linux

Sorry for the lack of updates for a while, I’ve been busy and haven’t really had any time on my computer.

This morning my new data cable for my mobile phone, a Siemens AX72, arrived in the post, I brought this one from eBay.co.uk. This will be the third cable I have to get my phone to connect to my computer.
The other two cables didn’t work, the first was from a google search and was a serial cable. The second cable came from amazon and was USB, but this one didn’t work either!

I plugged the cable into my USB hub and the green light lit up, which was more than the last cable did, I checked dmesg and I’ve got some communication going on

[code]usb 1-1.1: new full speed USB device using address 3
drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for Generic
drivers/usb/core/usb.c: registered new driver usbserial
drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial Driver core v2.0
drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for PL-2303
pl2303 1-1.1:1.0: PL-2303 converter detected
usb 1-1.1: PL-2303 converter now attached to ttyUSB0 (or usb/tts/0 for devfs)
drivers/usb/core/usb.c: registered new driver pl2303
drivers/usb/serial/pl2303.c: Prolific PL2303 USB to serial adaptor driver v0.10[/code]

Yes, now I just have to mount the phone!

The Siemens website has changed, and I can’t find there Mobile phone manager for Linux that I’m sure I have downloaded.

After googling around all morning I’ve found several good looking pieces of software.

The first site I came across was TuxMobil, it had a link to SieFS, I managed to install Fuse with no problems, but when it came to installing SieFS I had problems:

[code]# make
make all-recursive
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/anthony/downloads/siefs-0.5′
Making all in siefs
make[2]: Entering directory `/home/anthony/downloads/siefs-0.5/siefs’
gcc -I/usr/local/include -DFUSEINST=””/usr/local”” -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -DFUSE_USE_VERSION=22 -L/lib -o siefs siefs.o obex.o transport.o comm.o crcmodel.o charset.o /usr/local/lib/libfuse.a -lpthread
/usr/local/lib/libfuse.a(fuse.o)(.text+0x1392): In function `curr_time’:
/home/anthony/downloads/fuse-2.6.3/lib/fuse.c:738: undefined reference to `clock_gettime’
/usr/local/lib/libfuse.a(fuse.o)(.text+0x13e0):/home/anthony/downloads/fuse-2.6.3/lib/fuse.c:741: undefined reference to `clock_gettime’
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[2]: *** [siefs] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/anthony/downloads/siefs-0.5/siefs’
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/anthony/downloads/siefs-0.5′
make: *** [all] Error 2[/code]

Damn! Back to Google!

Wammu looks promising!

I installed Gammu as a shared library as required by python-gammu, no problem!

[code]# python setup.py build
running build
running build_ext
Package gammu not found, adding /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig to pkg-config search path
ERROR: Package gammu is too old!
You need version 1.9.20, but 1.9.19 is installed

You need installed gammu as shared library and enable pkg-config to find it.

This is done by invoking make installshared in gammu sources.[/code]

Right, okay, the latest version of gammu that I could find was 1.9.19, so I downloaded version 0.18 of python-gammu

[code]# python setup.py build
running build
running build_ext
Package gammu not found, adding /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig to pkg-config search path
error: invalid Python installation: unable to open /usr/lib/python2.3/config/Makefile (No such file or directory)[/code]

Okay, now my python installation is the problem! The only problem is that I can’t remember how I installed python, was is from source, RPM, or Rpmdrake (RPM package management software for Mandrake).
Edit: It was from Rpmdrake!

Ive got Gammu installed, Wammu is just the GUI, so I’ll just reinstall Gammu then use it from the command line!

If anyone can help me with this, or if you have any other recommendations for other pieces of software, comments are open!

I’ll post again tomorrow about what has happened, and if Moto4Lin will work, as I installed that last year for my sisters phone.

An Update

Well, its July 7, one year after the London bombing. I unfortunately missed the two minutes silence at noon.

In other news mum and my sister went off on their holidays on Saturday (1st July) leaving just me and dad on our own.
That weekend and Monday and Tuesday were hot, with the temperature reaching 30C (about 86F).
I have my computer lying on its side with the (other) side off just to get some cool air circulating. On Monday I had a fan pointing at it, and when I moved the fan away it froze. Since, I haven’t had any problems with it freezing.

Wednesday it was drizzling, and during the night it absolutely pissed down. During Thursday it was raining in the morning, and by the evening it was beginning to dry out.
The ford in Henbury was flooded, and nearly went up to the entrance of Crow Lane.
The bottom deck of the bus got flooded out.

On Sunday evening I drove on my own for the first time!
I went down to Clevedon via the A370 to Congresbury, then the B3133 to Clevedon.
I came back by the motorway.

I think that is all

Linux Rulez…

Cool, its boxing day, and I have managed to make a Christmas present work on Linux with no frustration, and I have setup two other things that I have been putting off for a while.

First to the Christmas present, its a USB 2 8 in 1 card reader/writer with a slot for SD cards, just what I wanted!
Reading the pdf manual on the CD tells me that on Mac OS 10.3 and higher just needs plugging in. One deep breath and its plugged in, check dmesg and it has been recognised.
Plug in the SD card, its put in upside-down (weird!) and a new icon appears on my desktop.
It has been automatically mounted under /mnt/removable
All my files are there. Whoohoo 🙂

The second success is finally getting DVD playback.
I was Stumbling around the web when I came across xinehq.de I’ve already got the player installed, it just didn’t want to play DVDs!
A quick google for libdvdcss, a download of the rpm and its installed
I have now watched the first five minutes of both “The Italian Job” (original) and “Johnny English”

The third and final success is the installation of the Belkin bluetooth adapter that I brought when I brought my PDA, 3 years ago!
I plugged it in, the little blue light stared to flash, and I downloaded BlueZ and managed to scan and make a short, but successful connaction with my PDA.
I also managed to find the computer with the PDA

Phew!
All that and I still managed to cook dinner!