Fekete Andras’ Weblog

Hello Readers,

So a couple weeks ago my XYL (significant other for you non-HAMs) broke her hand, and needed a way to take notes during class. Personally, I think she was jealous of my EEE PC and needed an excuse to get herself one. Anyway, she went out and bought herself one. She quickly figured out that she wanted to put windows on it since she’s more used to it, and liked some random software that made equation entry easy. (No the linux alternatives I offered weren’t good enough for her, I tried that.) So we embarked on a journey to get Windows on the Asus. I was against the idea from the get-go as Windows on any sort of flash drive gives me the heebie-jeebies. Unfortunately Beth is kind of persistent in the sense that she wants what isn’t easy to get.
Well, she looked around on the internet for ways she could install it herself as I wanted nothing to do with it. Eventually she ran into a dead end, and I cracked and decided to help her. She found this article. It helped us convince Windows XP to be able to boot off of a USB disk. The problem stems from the fact that Windows doesn’t load USB drivers right away. If you follow those instructions carefully it will work. We both ended up doing it, because when she was trying for the n-th time where ‘n’ is greater than her patience threshold I had to prove to her that it is possible.
I used a no-name USB enclosure for a 120GB laptop harddrive with a WriteMaster DVDRW in another no-name USB enclosure, and she used a WesternDigital 250GB Passport with a USB LaCie DVDRW. Both worked without any problems. Make sure to disable the internal SSD in the Bios. Windows will still detect it, but I think it won’t write to it. Maybe it’s just my paranoia. Also during several of the many reboots, the screen may be blank for a while, this is normal, I mean you *are* installing Windows XP. We used Windows XP with SP1a just like the guy had, but I’m fairly certain it would work with others. Just make sure it’s the Professional version.
The advantage of installing on an external drive (besides not eventually brick-ing your Asus), is that you can have Xandros or whatever other OS you want still installed on your Asus EEE PC.
So go ahead, give it a shot! Making the CD is the hardest part. Installing windows is just waiting for all those Sleep() and NOP instructions to finish.
-Fekete András

So for the longest time, I’ve been trying to figure out how to get a Ubuntu ISO bootable from a USB stick. Well, I finally found this gem of an article.
Essentially, all you have to do is create two partitions (believe me, I tried to do it with one but it won’t work). The first partition is a FAT16 partition containing the ISO image plus a syslinux config file. I’ve created a zip file of extra things you need to copy to the first partition here:Ubuntu USB linux files (save as a zip file).
Basically, the process is as follows:
1) create partition 1 as a ~750MB FAT16 partition with the label ‘liveusb’ and set it as an active partition.
2) create partition 2 as the rest of the space using ext2 type partition and label ‘casper-rw’. The label is important.
3) format each partition appropriately.
4) Copy the contents of the Ubuntu ISO to the FAT16 partition.
5) Copy the contents of the ZIP file to the FAT16 partition.
6) using syslinux, execute ’syslinux -f /dev/sdc1′ if you’re using linux, and the flash drive is sdc. Under windows, use ’syslinux.exe -f F:’ where the flash drive is located at F:.

That’s it. It’s not that hard to do really, just annoying to figure out. Not sure if there’s a way we can get away with creating a RAMFS for casper-rw. It would quite likely speed up the loading process.

So today, an interesting research was published on traffic jams. Personally, I find them interesting. Before I get ahead of myself, here’s a video, and the article of what the researchers did.
Near my house, at around 5 o’clock during the week, there is guaranteed to be a traffic jam. Whenever I need to drive that way, I usually play a ‘game’. The objective of the game, is how long I can keep the car rolling at a constant speed. This helps reduce my emissions by not needing to accelerate rapidly, but also reduces the wear on my brakes. I have to say I can keep it up for quite some time now. The thing is, I don’t drive at those times all the time. Maybe once or twice a month. But what I’ve noticed is that other people are starting to do it too. Which in turn makes my role in the game much easier.
Another interesting event that happened to me the other day was that I was teaching my friend to drive a manual car. We were driving on the highway and got stuck in a traffic jam. Since she was new to this style of driving with pressing the clutch and all, she didn’t really want to completely stop moving at any one time. When she was forced to stop, it took a while for her to get back up to speed. Now the amazing part: the cars in her lane were waaay ahead of us, but people in nearby lanes didn’t bother switching into our lane for some reason. It was kind of eerie, but nice that they weren’t swerving in and out of lanes.
So next time you’re out in traffic, be kind to your car and amuse yourself by playing that little game.
Until next time. Drive safe!
Fekete András