I installed Centos 5.3 and Xen on a hot new piece of hardware with the intention of runnig paravirtualized Centos 5.3 images on it. I’d probably be running a half dozen images at a time and with disk images at > 4GB I thought I’d run XFS as the Dom0 file system to speed the file access/create/delete times.

Big Mistake.

Every time I’d run a DomU guest, the host/Dom0 machine would consistently, but at different time intervals, crash. That’s right, the entire server would crash/hang/freeze. After a week of goofing around I finally tried a guest on a stock ext3 file system and Shazam! everything worked.

http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Xen/InstallingCentOSDomU

Here’s the M1730 and e1705 side by side:

The Sparcstation 20’s got dual 390Z50 and 128MB Ram.

Found here: http://www.digitalpropulsion.org/

Apparently, this is a very common problem that I’ve had a while. The fix is supposed cheap and easy and having done it once, the second time would be very easy. The Job took me about six hours with a lot of frustration the first time. Using these instructions you should be able to get it down to under two hours.

The parts used are:

• Napa red general purpose fluid hose in 1/2 and 5/8 ID sizes. The box they came in state they support 250 PSI which should be plenty.
• Four screw type hose clamps.
• A new P/S resevoir. The resevoir has some kind of filter in it so I decided to replace it too. They’re only about $25 online.
• One quart of Dextron IV ATF.
• Dremel.

To get the job done, I had to remove the entire air box/filter and the headlight. Removing the headlight’s a bit dodgy, but made the job possible. Some instructions are here: http://www.e46fanatics.com/how-tos/exterior/bmw_e46_headlight_trim/bmw_e46_headlight_trim.php, I’ve included them and some of my own additions here:

Removing the headlight assembly:

1. Pop the hood and remove your turn signal lens.  This is done by inserting a flat head screwdriver like so and pushing the tab towards the front of the car.
2. Next is removing the trim that runs underneath the headlight assembly.  Start by pushing the tab closest to the center of the car (first picture) and work across removing this piece.  Once you release the tab in the third picture, you are ready for the difficult part…
3. When you get to the tab that connects this piece to the fender, this will be the most difficult part of the procedure.  I used a couple of different techniques to release this tab.  On one side, I was able to sneak the flat head screwdriver behind the tab as pictured and push towards the front of the car to release the tab.  On the other side, that didn’t work so I had to take a small-tipped flat head screwdriver and weasel the tab open from the front side.  If you work with this tab enough, you should be able to get it off.
4. Remove the two screws holding the top of the assembly. Using a ratchet with eight inch extension, remove the screws holding the headlight assembly at the bottom rear, right and left of the assembly.
5. Disconnect the wires and the assembly should fall right out.
6. These headlight assemblies are unbelievably expensive. Put it in a VERY safe place.

Tips on replacing the hoses are as follows:

1. Cover your alternator with rags to keep ATF out of it.
2. Have a bowl hand to catch extra ATF as you dis-assemble the system.
3. Using your Pela oil extractor, extract all the oil out of the resevoir,
4. Disconnect the resevoir from the hoses, you may need the dremel to cut the factory clamps. Keep that bowl and extra towels handy.
5. Extract ATF from the hoses with the Pela.
6. Cut the factory clamp off the P/S pump with the dremel.

Here’s the hard part. On this connection:

..you need to dis-engage part 1.

A useless internal schematic is here:

You really should use BMW tool 5346:

…and considering you’re saving about $400 over the dealer price by doing this yourself, I’d probably buy it.

Unfortunately, the plastic release collar broke on my car so I cut off the whole thing with the Dremel.

Replace the hoses, fill the system with ATF, turn on the car, turn the wheels all the way right to left a couple/three times, refill and your done.

Dell has been _very_, VERY, good to me and I’d recommend them in a second. But buying $2,000 laptops sight unseen is a bit unnerving.

palm TX PDA palm TX PDA Intel ARM-based processor 312MHz 320 x 480 TFT IrDA Bluetooth WirelessLAN

Unfortunately, I just discovered that the WiFi is broken on the unit. It’s a bummer because that was a fun feature, but not terribly useful as the included browser ‘Blazer’ sucked. The symptoms were strange: everytime I turned on the Wifi radio, the TX would immediately reset. I’m sure it was a software problem so after hard reseting and clearing data a couple times, even with Palm tech support, I gave up. I even tried loading a new ROM from here with no luck.

Back on topic… I keep all the movies I have in their original VOB format off the DVD. That means we can watch them on the TV at the same quality in which they came off the disk, and transcoding for projects like this becomes a bit easier and higher quality. Space wise it’s not a problem now that we have 1.5TB disks…

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB 3.5″ SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive (bare drive) Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31500341AS 1.5TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive (bare drive)

To start, download and install the Handbrake GUI (it includes the command line tool) from here http://handbrake.fr/?article=download to your PC.

Then download tcpmp.palmos.0.72RC1.zip from here:

http://picard.exceed.hu/tcpmp/test/

…extract the files and install these to your Palm TX

• tcpmp.prc
• tcpmp_mp3_plugin.prc
• tcpmp_mpeg4_plugin.prc

You can install these others, but the free xvid video and mp3 audio codecs above work well enough. I’d recommend these for flexibility as they support the DVD video and audio formats:

• ac3.plugin.0.72RC1.zip
• ffmpeg.plugin.0.72RC1.zip

After getting the above software installed and collect the VOBs or AVIs of the movies you’d like to transfer, open handbrake and configure these options (click to see the full size image):

1) Select file
2) Browse for the VOB you’d like to convert
3) Enter an output name with an .avi extension
4) Select the XVID video encoder
5) Select the MP3 audio encoder
6) Set the size to 480×320 the maximum dimensions of the TX display.
7) Optionally de-interlace the video. This is very technical, but if the source is interlaced (likely) and you don’t de-interlace, the output on the TX will look terrible. If the source is not Interlaced, you don’t need this. I don’t think de-interlacing a non-interlaced source will hurt so you may want to always set this.

Then select the video tab (8)

9) Set the bit rate to 400. This looks reasonably good. You may want to set it higher (5 or 6 hundred) for a higher quality movie.

Click ‘Start’ and wait. One hour of video takes about an hour to transcode on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo.

Copy the new avi file to the Palm TX via an SD card and enjoy. Be sure to rotate the display and view in ‘full screen’ mode.

Note, for those who prefer the command line, here’s the above settings for the Handbrake command line too:

“c:\Program Files\Handbrake\HandBrakeCLI.exe” -i <SOURCE_FILE> -o <OUTPUT_FILE> -w 480 -l 320 -d -E lame -e xvid