Friday, August 31, 2007

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

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