Concepts in the Paradox

On the computer front, my file server seems to have forgotten about it’s network interface. I don’t know how long ago this happened, but I guess I should fix it. Backups are sort of important, and all my backups get dumped onto this box every night.

The Z is happily compiling Konqueror-embedded and xmms, and has been for a few hours now. The poor thing has some pretty terrible disk I/O, and I’m wondering if it would just be faster to do my compiles over the wireless with NFS. The disk is really slow — like it matters though. When I put it into daily use I’m not going to be compiling things all the time. I’m going to post a Palm TX vs. Z SL-C3200 review here in a few days and post my package builds as well. Openbsd doesn’t include pre-compiled packages for the Z, much to my chagrin.

I’m in the process of finding all the bits and pieces for my Mac Mini so I can put it up on Craigslist. So far I have the Mac Mini (512MB, wifi, bt, super drive, 1.42Ghz), Belkin Hub for Mac Mini, and iSight gathered together. I need to reload the OS, stick it in a box, then see how much I can get someone in the city to give me for it. I’m thinking about $600 for everything, maybe $500. I don’t know what I’m going to do with the extra cash since it counts as computer budget, and there isn’t anything I really want right now. Perhaps I’ll get a Happy Hacker keyboard for work and save the rest for later?

I went home early with the dizzies and a scratchy throat. After the drugs kick in, I think I’ll resume installing OpenBSD on the Zaurus. I was able to get the bsd.rd to start up, and the little guy is dual booting, but after I fdisk’d the thing (very carefully, mind you), I discovered that the USB network card wasn’t being picked up by OpenBSD. This totally sucks, because I wanted to do the net install.

After double-checking the supported device listing, I found that my SMC 2102USB is indeed supported by the kue driver. My theory is that the card is sucking down more power than the Zaurus’s little usb port can pump out, so I’m going to run it through a powered hub to see if that fixes it. If not, then I’m doing a disk install, since I left 400MB for the Sharp ROM so the dual boot would still work. I’ll pull over the tarballs from the openbsd site, load them onto the 400MB partition which is fat32 formatted, and do a disk install.

4 more days until I get the CF wireless card. Right now it is on a truck in Texas. Damn Texans! Give me my network card!