Month: June 2008

A couple of years ago I picked up a used laptop (Gateway Solo 5150) for a great price.  Sound doesn’t work, but paired up with a wifi card it makes a great remote terminal for Jenn’s Mac Mini.  Sadly, the other day the hard drive packed it in.  Instead of treating this like an excuse to buy a laptop that has sound (and a lot more horse power) I thought it would be worth considering replacing the drive with a compact flash card – basically a DIY Solid State Drive (SSD).

Checking prices locally, it seemed I could pick up a CF to 2.5 IDE adapter for $24.  Considering a cheap 1Gig CF card was $13 – paying nearly double just to interface it seemed a bit steep.  Well, eBay to the rescue.

Yup, I was lucky enough to score one for a penny.  It sort of makes you want to pick up that penny the next time you see one on the ground.  While many of the 1 cent auctions seems to hit you on shipping, this one was really just $2.98 to Canada.  The amount that came off my credit card via PayPal was $3.05.

Shipping insurance was $1.50 – and while normally I do consider it worthwhile, this time I figured paying a 50% premium to insure it seemed silly.  Well it arrived safely today – after the expected delay due to shipping method and source (Hong Kong).

The seller on eBay was alpinetopline, which seems to be related to suntekstore.com.  I’ll certainly not hesitate to give these folk more business based on this transaction as it went smoothly and as expected.  If you wanted to avoid the eBay experience, you can buy exactly the same CF to 2.5 IDE adapter from suntekstore.com directly.

A little fiddling with the laptop CMOS setup to make an old 512MB CF card I had around detect properly, and a DOS boot floppy (yup, this laptop has a floppy) and I was good to go.  Now the fun of installing Puppy Linux on it again.

Well I finally got around to de-underclocking my NSLU2 (aka Slug).  It took about 10 minutes start to finish, so I really have no excuse for why it took me this long to get around to it.

The NSLU2 Linux wiki has very detailed directions on cracking the case open.  Go slowly to avoid snapping off the plastic tabs.

Now comes the fun part, modifying the hardware.  It turns out that for whatever reason the NSLU2 was underclocked, the wikipedia article discusses this and other interesting facts about this device.  While this is a discontinued device, they are readily available from amazon still.  All we need to do to allow the Slug to run at its native 266MHz is remove a resistor.  I used a pair of tweezers.

If you look closely, you’ll see the tiny resistor in the center of the palm of my hand.  I later dropped it onto the floor and lost sight of it.

Putting the unit back together isn’t documented as well on the wiki – I found that it was easier to insert the circuit board into the light grey “front” and then snap the back on.  Again, go slowly to avoid breaking any tabs off.

Having installed a version of Debian on it the other day, I was able to ssh into my new “turbo slug” and cat /proc/cpuinfo which showed me BogoMIPS: 266.24.  Success!  It does seem to be more responsive.  I’m tempted to try tinkering with doing a memory upgrade, but that may be beyond my soldering skill level.