My Fujitsu 3400 Alarm Clock - Part 1

A few years ago I received a demo copy of MicroSoft's OneNote (ON) 03. I bought a Fujutsu 3400 on eBay for $100 thinking it would be a good way to test ON without spending a ton of money. I used it both at work and school and it did the job. But, of course, as is to be expected with toys I had to upgrade my computer when ON 07 came out. I now do my note taking on a IBM x41t. So, what to do with the Fujitsu. Much to my wifes chagrin, I did not sell it on eBay and recover some of the money I'd spent. Instead, it waited paitently until the recent release of Ubuntu (Feisty). After installing Ubuntu on an old Dell 5100 I thought that the Fujitsu would be a good candidate for an OS change. My first problem was the fact that the Fujitsu is old enough that the BIOS does not support USB boot devices. The only options are Floppy or HDD. Out of curiousity I pulled the HD from the Dell and installed it into the Fujitsu. It actaully worked! Unfortunately, the limited memory (192Mb) that is available was a serious limitation to Ubuntu. After looking at DSL and Puppy I decided that Xubuntu was the way to go. But, I decided that if I was going to do this, I'd do it right and get the floppy drive. Again went to eBay and secured the necessary item with little trouble. I followed the directions from "LARSW" on the Ubuntu Furum Site on how to create a dos boot disk and was able to get Xubuntu installed on my Fujitsu. The only changes that had to be made as far as the directions are in section (d)

• Feisty has the image and initrd files in the casper directory, not the install directory
• I used the following parameters for linld which are a little different from larsw's:
  linld image=d:\casper\vmlinuz initrd=d:\casper\initrd.gz "cl=root=/dev/ram boot=casper ramdisk_size=1048576 devfs=mount,dall"

What's left to do:

• Get the computer to wake up at a preset time
• Get it to go back to sleep (stand-by) after a set amount of time
• Get it to play music when it's time fo the alarm to go off.
• Get it to show weather/sports scores/new headlines on the desktop

My Toys

Figured since I said this was a blog about my tech toys I should Breifly list out some of the equipment that I currently play wth:
Dell 5100 laptop that is triple-boot with XP, Ubuntu and Xubuntu.
Fujitsu 3400 slate running Xubuntu.
IBM X41T convertable running Vista. Virtual PC with an Xubuntu install.
Generic P4 1.8 Ghz desktop dual boot with XP and Ubuntu.

Nothing to high tech, but it keeps me entertained, and with the exception of the IBM, which I use for school and work, if I break one it's not a big deal.

I enjoy music, so I also have an old network storage device with 6000 mp3's of my favorite tunes.

Stay tuned (really!). My next post will be about the beginings of my alarm clock project.

First things first

So, why am I doing this. Short answer - because everyone else is. Actually while working on a recent project and surfing round and round to find information on the hardware, bios, operating system, etc I decided that I would like to document what I was doing in the rare chance that someone else would find what I had done to be of use to them. I know that I could have posted to forums specific to what I was working on, but this seems more fun and lets me express a small amount of creativity. As I stated in the title - I tend to bounce around quite a bit as far as projects go, so it should be interesting (I hope). Stay tuned for my first project: My Fujitsu 3400 pen PC alarm clock.