[hllug] Sam whut am
- From: "Donguitar" <donguitar@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "HLLUG" <hllug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2007 14:21:17 -0500
I acquired a couple of Dell GX115's and got into one of them today. I
couldn't get it to boot from a CD but the CD drive was behaving erratically
so I suspected it might be on the fritz. I swapped it out and solved the
problem. The first distro I tried in it was SAM
http://www.sam-linux.org/
I really liked Sam and it ran beautifully but I didn't try the 3D desktop
because the PC only had 256 MB of RAM. Instead of trying another distro I
just clicked on the "Install" icon (on the live CD desktop) and installed
Sam to the hard drive. Green isn't my favorite color so I installed my
wallpaper folder first thing to get rid of that. I dropped in the CD with
my wallpaper folder on it and a CD drive icon appeared on the desktop.
I right clicked on the icon and selected "Open" and it came up in a window.
Then, it was a simple matter to drag and drop the wallpaper folder to the
home folder, wait for the files to be transferred, right click on the icon
and
select "Unmount", right click on it again and select "Eject".
Mounting a removable USB drive was a real challenge in Debian (which Lee
had to help me with) but not so with Sam. I plugged in my little 250 MB
USB drive and an icon appeared on the desktop with the name of
the drive showing (DONSTOY) I right clicked on the icon, selected "Open"
and it came up in a window. I closed the window, right clicked on the icon,
selected "Unmount", unplugged the drive and the icon disappeared (I didn't
need anything from the drive, I just wanted to see if it too would
automount).
Sam is the XFce version of PCLinuxOS, our favorite Linux distro but the
minimum requirement for PCLinuxOS is 700 MHz and, in my experience,
it's slow enough to be annoying at 800 MHz whereas Sam zipped right
along at 600 MHz. I couldn't get the frozen bubbles game to work on
these computers and am wondering "what's up with that?" but everything
else seemed to work.
Of possible interest:
USB drives can cause problems when they're plugged in if there's any sort of
static charge on them. For example, if you lay your USB on the desk under
your CRT monitor (which has internal high voltage fields), for even a few
seconds, it's almost certainly going to possess a static charge. Here's how
you can prevent the static charge from causing you problems.
Remove the cover from the front of your USB drive and grasp it gently, by
the metal case, between your thumb and hand while you touch your forefinger
to the metal chassis of your computer and hold your finger in place for a
few seconds. This will dissipate the majority of whatever charge is present
through your finger. Now regrasp the USB drive to plug it in but first
touch it's metal housing directly to the computer chassis to finish off any
residual charge. Then quickly slide the drive into position and plug it in.
I had to work this our for myself because my computer was shutting off and
rebooting every time I plugged in my USB drive. "Back in the day", I wore a
wrist strap while working on any sort of integrated circuits which connected
me to earth ground through a ten million ohm resistor to dissipate my bodies
static charge (and that of anything I was handling) while protecting me from
any potentially harmful voltages I might inadvertently encounter. Some
types of CMOS components can be totally destroyed by handling them
without a ground strap.
If my description isn't clear to you, I posted this information with demo
images to my lockergnome blog. (shortened link) http://snipurl.com/1fyzg
(full link)
http://www.lockergnome.com/nexus/eldergeek/2007/04/09/preventing-potential-usb-drive-problems/
Don
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