TC1000-Comments

HP/Compaq TC1000 Comments

This page is for recording ramdom thoughts about the TC1000 as I use it.

04/24

• Hand writting rocks under WinXP. It does a surprisingly good job of recognizing my scribblings.
• Support for detecting and using wireless networks is quite nice in WinXP. It appears to use the SSID to name and possibly identify wireless configurations. Although I suspect we also have to use the MAC address of the AP to help further uniquely identify the network.
  
  Perhaps we could do something like this in Linux. We could tie this into the ifcfg-* files used to configure network devices and use a daemon to watch iwconfig to note when the SSID changes.
• To my surprise the Transmeta is able to scale it's speed way down (300MHz) when streaming and playing music across the network. I would have expected it to be quite busy while doing this. Any graphics operations (rendering windows, etc.) causes the CPU to kick into high speed (1GHz).

04/25

• Using the external USB multibay with the DVD/CDRW cuts the battery life in half. Although you can still watch a standard length movie (< 2hrs) while on battery.
• You can boot from both the external USB multibay and the USB floopy.
• The USB floppy and the USB Multibay DVD/CDRW are auto-detected by RedHat 8 and use SCSI emulation.
  
  The floppy is known as /dev/sda
  
  The DVD/CDRW is /dev/sdb.
• When using PartitionMagic to set the active partition to something other than the WinXP partition for booting be aware that it changes the WinXP partition to "Hidden HPFS/NTFS". This causes WinXP to fail booting and gives the appearance of some files missing (missing autocheck binary).
  
  Using the PartitionMagic boot floppys and setting the WinXP partition as active fixes the problem.
  
  Using fdisk under Linux to mark the WinXP partition as bootable does not fix the problem. I suspect the partition type identifier would need to be changed also.

04/26

• I can't find any information about the Compaq Wireless adaptor. I'm hoping it's just a repackaging of another vendors card and I can find support for it.

04/27

• Just discovered that the FCC provides a web interface for looking up FCC ID numbers. This allowed me to lookup the the FCC ID for the Compaq (aka Atmel) 802.11 Wireless mini-pci card. Photos, tests reports, and the original user manual can be found at: https://gullfoss2.fcc.gov/cgi-bin/ws.exe/prod/oet/forms/reports/Search_Form.hts?mode=Edit&form=Exhibits&application_id=374964&fcc_id=MCLT60H570

05/06

• Installed RH9, still having problems with Twiddler2/USB being recognized. Although, I used the Twiddler all through the installation process. The install kernel image worked fine with it. I will have to look into which drivers it loads and see if they differ witht he post installed configuration.
• My hacks to the Atmel minipci driver cause the system to lockup when loading the pcifvnet driver under RH9.
• Grrr - stupid RedHat has dropped support for MPEG3 in any of it's shipped RPM files due to patents. My whole music collection is ripped to MPEG3. I need a mpg2ogg utility.