Stumbling across some MacMini tips/tricks

Tip 1 - Booting Puppy from CD
Having a good play around with Puppy Linux led me to getting this to work within Parallels running on Leopard with the MacMini (intel core duo). It succeeded quite well, neatly running Puppy directly from the ISO file, though it's a bit freaky being able to flick between 9 desktops on the Mac and a further 4 running on Puppy (note that my machine has been upgraded to 2GB of RAM so reserving 500MB for Puppy Linux was no problem). The only drawback was that Compiz Fusion would not run within Parallels (I really wanted to see the 3D cube working). I decided to try running from CD direct.

Booting from CD was not an obvious process as unlike a PC the Mac will not boot automatically from CD just because it's in the drive. The trick is to keep the Option key pressed when your machine powers up. It then checks bootable devices and gives you a neat graphic display of the options. Puppy then ran perfectly well including all the lovely 3D Compiz goodness. Though it's not a replacement for me working on Leopard it could be a really handy backup if I run into hard disk problems.

Footnotes:

• I'm unsure if there's a way to get the boot up to work straight from a USB drive, this doesn't seem to be part of the standard boot up routine.
• Parallels doesn't seem to let me share the Mac hard disk or USB drives with Puppy though I haven't spent any time researching a workaround.
• The benefit of taking virtual machine snapshots is a key bonus, I can install options and change settings on puppy with the confidence that I can roll back to a happy working state.

Tip 2 - Ejecting a CD
While creating Puppy bootable CDs I had a problem with one not being read properly on the Mac (probably a scratched disk). Annoyingly it would not eject using software control. This included trying to get it to eject using direct commands from within Terminal. My final solution was to keep F12 pressed on the keyboard when powering up, magically the disk ejected. It seems an amazingly user unfriendly feature to have no manual eject process, not even a pin hole to work a paper-clip into, particularly on a machine which is so notoriously difficult to force open the case. From now on, I'm being extra careful to ensure disks look spotless before inserting them.

How to breathe life back into a 10 year old Compaq laptop using Xubuntu

Many years ago I lent an old slightly damaged laptop to a friend (the laptop locking mechanism was broken and the screen slightly damaged). Last year he bought a cheap but highly functional laptop after my loaner, now nearly ten years old, stopped working and eventually returned it to me for possible repair and use.

It is a Compaq E500 which has a rather stylish black and grey layout, good quality keyboard and a clear colour screen (in 1999 it was retailing for $1,970 and in 2008 they sell on eBay for under $100). The hard disk had fatally crashed and windows now failed to boot up only ever giving a blue screen of death. I'm unsure if the hard disk has a physical problem but after it laying around on my study floor for six months I thought it might be possible to replace Windows with a suitable free small version of Linux so the machine could become a handy wireless web laptop and guest machine. [E500 Spec: 14.1 in 1024x786 TFT display (1600x1200 external), 12GB hard disk, CDROM 24x, Video Out, Pentium III 650MHz, 192MB SDRAM.]

After failing to get the standard Ubuntu to install from a CD I had to hand (I gave up after letting the disk whizz around for over a half hour) I did a little research and opted for Xubuntu which is a cut down version for machines with more limited resources. I downloaded and created a CD from the ISO file on my trusty MacMini. The E500 install took over an hour but the main screen gave a countdown bar so you can see something is happening. I re-booted when it told me and it worked first time. It boots up more quickly than it used to under Windows and had even recognized my 2GB USB flash drive!

After a little play to ensure that it seemed responsive enough I dug out an old Belkin wireless card (802.11b) and was quite astonished when I plugged it in and the OS used it to find wireless connections without any further configuration. I had to tweak the wifi settings to connect to my secure network but had it working as a wireless laptop fairly painlessly.1

It's now a smart "netbook" (with a much better screen than the Acer Aspire One) for checking email while watching TV. The remaining issues are hardware specific2 and I'm not sure I'll get around to fixing them, e.g. recognizing the function key buttons for changing brightness and volume & the second touch pad key doesn't do anything. All in all I'm pretty delighted to turn a useless brick into a nicely functional spare laptop.

Footnotes

[1] The old Belkin wireless card is so out of date that it can't support an encrypted connection so security on this laptop is reliant on screening by MAC address. In the process of testing it out I found wicd is a neat free Linux graphical tool for sniffing out and managing your wireless connection. I have just bought a cheap 802.11g card off eBay to solve the security problem.

[2] The hardware side remains a puzzle. The E500's BIOS is dated 1999 and there's a new BIOS that helps to solve the problem of buttons being available to non-Windows OS's (see discussion). Having reformatted the disk I can't install the new BIOS to flash (using a .exe file that HP have available) or (for some reason I can't fathom) run DOS from a floppy even with it set as the first boot device.

Postscript

I have tried booting from CD using the latest Puppy Linux (Dingo). It runs well, possibly faster than Xubuntu but I haven't managed to map the keyboard touchpad correctly yet. If I get this working I'll give it good trial as Xubuntu tends to take a couple of seconds to change screen tabs when running Opera, while I haven't noticed any real performance problems with Puppy Linux so far. When you think about it, it's pretty impressive to be able to run the latest version of the Opera browser on such an old machine.