My touchpad loves Jaunty

Just find out today that my BYON M31W’s touchpad is fully configurable by Jaunty.  I find this hard to resolve on Windows, but with Jaunty – hey it is fun.  I believe that the touchpad is made by Compal.

First, vertical and (almost unused) horizontal scrolling.  All I have to do is just slide two fingers anywhere on the touch pad vertically (to scroll vertically) and (perhaps) horizontally for scrolling horizontally.  Just find it out on the ubuntu forum.  It is quite different with Synaptics touchpad (slide on the right or bottom side).

The “tapping” function can be disabled!  Accidently tapping the touchpad which resulting an unwanted actions is very annoying. This nuisance can be avoided by System -> Preference -> Mouse menu and click on the Touchpad Tab.  I can disable Mouse click with touchpad from there.

Great!

Revitalizing a Zombie PC

For one and another reason, I finally make a decision to push my PC technical experience to a higher level. Actually it is nothing about skills or intellectual thing but more on the determination side

A friend has a NEC Valuestar PIII 667MHz with an intermittently malfunctioning hard disk drive on it and some other irritating compulsive error behavior. He is not interested to replace the hard disk drive (or at least not yet interested) regarding to the value of the whole unit. So he just ask me to keep it for an undefined period of time, at least until he needed it. I also has another 40GB WD Caviar which is formerly failing, but after I removed the controller board and clean the contacts points, it is back on duty – at least till now.

So I just apply a re-assembly works and some heavy cleanup to the whole unit with some additional SDRAM and USB PCI card and here I go with a functional desktop PC. I just need to replace the ATA hard disk cable when I find out that the IDE device (hard disk and CD ROM drive) is intermittently detected.

Here I want to share the cleaning method that I’ve done.

I disassembled the whole unit to a modular level possible for DIY level and cleaned all the dust and spydey web using a “crew-cut” brush.

and for some stubborn small animals stain regarding to how long this unit has been kept in a “mouse and mosquito” room,

Slicing images using Inkscape

I’ve been using Inkscape for about a month now and found it awesomely great.  Very intuitive and high usability of UIs.  I’ve done several page mockups using this wonderful tool and finally find myself wondering “Where’s the slicing tool…”

After sometimes Googling around, I found no satisfactory result and then I just nagging around kicking some unexplainable objects in the neighborhood putting the blame of this incompetency to the whole world (just kidding….) then some angels (actually some disgusting tiny smelly friends who lives inside my empty head) comes and bump me an idea on how I can slice with Inkscape.

ASK Cable Modem Windows USB Driver

This driver is quite hard to find, or at least the last time I did find it hard to find on the internet – in fact, I did not find any   Not even from ASK official website.

This driver is for using the ASK Docsis Cable Modem via USB port on Windows operating system (Win98, WinME, WinXP, Vista) regarding to the INF file description.  Using this modem via ethernet port is no problem at all, but in last my case when you need to connect to this modem by its USB port – then this driver is mandatory.

I finally get this modem driver by scraping it from a computer with the driver installed. As I have tested on a freshly installed Windows XP (SP1), it was working just fine with no hassle at all.  Just extract the driver package and point to the folder where you’ve extract the files when Windows ask for the driver.  There were some (minor) unsigned driver warning issue – it is OK, just click OK/Continue.

You can download the driver from from the following link ask-cable-modem.

The modem itself is look like a small rounded white box (about the size of CD case but much thicker), with no brand – just model and s/n label on the bottom.  Most comes with Megavision Internet cable provider (Indonesia).  Sorry I did not take picture of the modem.

SiS 671 and Linux

I’ve been on a “local brand” notebook computer for almost a year  – I believe it is just another China manufactured barebone notebook.  It is a BYON M31W S/S with Intel Celeron M 550 processor.  Thanks to my notebook choosing incompetency, instead of Intel chipsets, this notebook is utilizing SiS chipsets.  Well, it was the cheapest option when I bought it, honestly speaking – and at that time (and still going for now) – that really matters.

It is from the  SiS 67x family which is according to every Linux distribution forum I’ve visited is having a serious driver issue so it cannot use the chipset 3D ability.  It seemed that SiS won’t let the 3D Linux display device driver -  even the binary to be released to the public.  There’s a story about a guy, Barros Lee who claimed that he wrote 3D driver for this chipset, bust cannot release it since he work for SiS and he is not permitted to do that.