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MP BIOS Toshiba - semi revival
by Russell Reiter 20 Mar '15

20 Mar '15

Since this weekend seems to be my hackers holiday at home, no fires, no fude's and no FUBAR, I thought I update the progress on the Toshiba laptop Peter offered up to the list. When last hacked I had XFCE running on Light DM with a small ram upgrade. Still not enough to force the video aperture to 64mg but videos played well and the system did not appear to overheat. Then I got cocky. I had fixed the dsdt tables but still couldn' connect to the apic timer. Everything seemed stable so I installed Chrome. The rest happened so quickly I didn't even have time to say this does not look good and presto, one cooked drive. I had acquired the other Toshiba I was helping my friend with when he got tied of failing to get the battery to charge after installing Windows 7. So I had another drive to tinker with but there are two important differences in the laptops. The one Peter gave me has single core and runs without the battery being installed, the other one is quad core and will not start without a battery being present. So what to do, experiment with the other drive or something else, I went with something else. I removed the drive, removed the battery, removed the wifi and booted. The unit fails to register the realtek Ethernet and loops the message but the unit stays alive. So now I have a fairly quiet three port USB charger. Oh yea, I also have the unit sitting on a USB cooling base with he access plates removed from the base but this is for the next part. Sugar on a Stick. This is the base OS for the one child one computer project. For some reason this OS requires the battery to be installed in it. I imagine that is because of the form factor for the prototype laptops which appear to have a perminent built in battery. So the upshot is Sugar runs fine, no Ethernet as of yet but the unit itself is quite stable. Hours of use and I've left it on overnight. No freezups, crashes or chokes the next day and no excessive heating. No temp gauge but by hand it feels a lot cooler. So I will probably upgrade the ram at some point which will increase the video aperature to 64mg and try a full fedora with LDXE or something similar. So thanks to Peter, it's lodes of fun and keeps me out of trouble. Well for the most part anyway. :-) Russell

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Botnet Email Address?
by phiscock＠ee.ryerson.ca 20 Mar '15

20 Mar '15

Subject: It sounds crazy but her mind can be easily controlled From: "Michael Scott" <support(a)botss.nl> Spam from an email address 'botss'? Maybe this is an in-joke among the spammers... -- Peter Hiscocks Syscomp Electronic Design Limited, Toronto http://www.syscompdesign.com USB Oscilloscope and Waveform Generator 647-839-0325

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Cool, but obscure unix tools :: Software architect Kristof Kovacs
by phiscock＠ee.ryerson.ca 20 Mar '15

20 Mar '15

http://kkovacs.eu/cool-but-obscure-unix-tools Courtesy of my Bro, Dave Hiscocks. -- Peter Hiscocks Syscomp Electronic Design Limited, Toronto http://www.syscompdesign.com USB Oscilloscope and Waveform Generator 647-839-0325

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Keep X from going to sleep
by William Witteman 19 Mar '15

19 Mar '15

Here's a problem I'm hoping to solve: When idle for some amount of time, X shuts down the screen. When a program like VLC is playing a video (or even paused) this does not happen. How can I tell X to never sleep? I just want it to send output down that cable, constantly, forever. I manage screen burn and power wasting by turning off the monitor, but when the screen goes to sleep, my inexpensive monitor (an LG) sometimes has trouble noticing and won't display anything until X is restarted, which is a pain. Thanks! PS The system is Debian testing.

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(no subject)
by R. Russell Reiter 18 Mar '15

18 Mar '15

Sorry for the empty post just now. I wish I could claim to be all thumbs, but the way I see kids today operate one of these things ... I can't even do that. -- Sent via K-9 Mail.

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It's alive! Utah software company's decade-old suit against IBM revived | The Salt Lake Tribune
by James Knott 18 Mar '15

18 Mar '15

Some things never die! http://www.sltrib.com/news/2303519-155/its-alive-sco-group-suit-revived

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OT: How Superstar Companies Like Apple Are Killing America’s High-Tech Future
by Ivan Avery Frey 18 Mar '15

18 Mar '15

Might be of interest to people on this mailing list. http://ineteconomics.org/institute-blog/william-lazonick-how-superstar-comp…

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Microsoft reveals patents that read on Android (some on Linux kernel)
by D. Hugh Redelmeier 17 Mar '15

17 Mar '15

Microsoft has been asking for royalties from all sorts of Linux vendors and Android vendors. They've claimed something like "200 patent families" apply to Android. Most companies have signed up, as far as we know. Kyocera has not os Microsoft is suing them for infringement of 6 specific patents. Now we know which they are. They each look obvious to me but apparently that's not the test that is used in the US. <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/09/microsoft_lobs_sueball_at_kyocera/> Apparently Microsoft make billions a year off these. US patents expire 20 years after filing date. The latest was filed in late 2004 so it runs for almost a decade longer.

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Gnu Manifesto Turns 30
by Ivan Avery Frey 17 Mar '15

17 Mar '15

http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-gnu-manifesto-turns-thirty

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Dirty Power and Wi Fi Far field effect
by Russell Reiter 16 Mar '15

16 Mar '15

I live close to the exhibition grounds which is near to one of the city's major grid switches. For example, they were testing the new streetcars, the ones with three sections for navigating tight turns and they browned us down to (I assume) 50hz. This was visible as all the lights dimmed and the streetcar appeared to navigate the loop a short time later. As I don't have ups I had powered down my tower. The next time I powered up the breaker in the power supply tripped and when I reset it and booted, my 1.5v agp video card was toasted, at least I hope its the card and not elsewhere on the bus. So that's not so bad, there's no enterprise stuff at risk, I just hack together another box and carry on. However, now I have a real problem and I'm in need of a solution. Yesterday I fired up the WiFi while my SO was drying her hair. I toasted her salon quality hair dryer. Not good. :-( There is no gfi outlet and at this point I'm wondering if I need UPS, for the hair dryer, if not the computer. So my question is, does anyone on this list have similar problems and a low cost hack they have used to deal with Toronto's iffy grid. TIA Russell

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