Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

After waiting for almost 6 months from when it launched, and a month after I placed the order I am now a proud owner of a RaspberryPi 🙂 For those of you who are wondering what on earth I am talking about, its a computer the size of a phone (see pic below comparing it with my old Nokia N95) costing $35 that is powerful enough to play Quake3. Its amazing how small this thing is and the features they have managed to cram on to the box. It was delivered yesterday and I was a bit upset at the customs duty I had to pay on the device (paid about 50% of the cost of the device + the cost of shipping as duty) but it still turns out to be a lot cheaper than any other contender.

I was really excited to work on it but when I got home and started to set it up I found that my SD card reader/writer was no longer functioning 🙁 so after a few hours of trying and turning the house upside-down for the other card reader that I know I have and just couldn’t find, I finally gave up and messaged Krishna at 12:30am asking him to bring a SD Card reader with him to the office (which he did, thanks!) the next day. Had to wait a day to get back home and once I got home with the reader I then downloaded the Debian image to my computer and wrote it to the card, powered the system with my old blackberry charger, plugged in an Ethernet cable and a HDMI cable (actually HDMI to DVI cable if you want to be picky) connecting the Pi to my second monitor. That’s when I hit a snag. Turns out that I don’t have a single USB keyboard at home, all my keyboards are PS/2. 🙁 So now I either need to borrow a USB keyboard or go buy a small one. In any case I powered the Pi up to see if it works ok and it powered up fine.

The first boot took about a min, but after that the system gets to the login prompt in about 15 secs, which is pretty cool. I can reduce the boot time further by disabling services that I know I won’t use (like NFS etc). Unfortunately SSH wasn’t enabled on the box, so without a keyboard and no remote connection I couldn’t really do anything more at this time, but I am full of idea’s for this device.

Below are some pics of the Pi in action:

Comparison shot of the RaspberryPi next to a Nokia N95

The RaspberryPi hooked up and ready for action

Initial Boot Sequence of RaspberryPi

I wanted to take a comparison shot of the Pi next to my Galaxy Nexus but I was using the Nexus to take the photos (didn’t feel like pulling out the camera, take a pic, take out the card and then upload the pics as compared to; take the photo, FTP to computer).

Well this is all for now, am a bit sad, but still excited. Keep an eye here for more on the Pi and my experiments with it.

– Suramya

A few days ago dad’s HP Pavilion dv5000 started acting funny. He had put the laptop in hibernation but all of a sudden it would start up on its own for a few seconds and then would shut down due to low battery. This woke him up so he brought the laptop to my room so that I could take a look at it. I looked at it but didn’t find anything funny so I shutdown the system and told him that I would take a look at it in the morning.

A few minutes later the laptop started up again even though I had shut it down completely. I then removed the battery and left the AC Adapter plugged in to see if the problem was caused due to a faulty battery. But the laptop still started up again without anyone touching it. So I decided to take the laptop apart to see if there was a loose connection or something that was triggering the boot.

This laptop is designed in a way to make it really hard to open without knowing exactly where all the screws are located. Some of them are hidden behind other items like the Harddrive and the DVD-ROM, some are on the other side so you only see them when you remove the DVD Drive and look under the laptop again. It took me a couple of hours to get it all open.

The photos posted by Chris Davis on his flicker account helped a lot in getting the stupid laptop open. Thanks Chris. I owe you a beer.

Compared to this my Sony Vaio had taken me about 1/2 hour to open. The worst part is even simple stuff like resetting the BIOS by removing the battery require you to dismantle pretty much the entire laptop. I think this is an issue with all HP systems because I remember trying to upgrade the RAM on a HP desktop and that took us most of the day (this was back in 2006 I think)

Anyways once I managed to open the laptop, I cleaned it and put it back together. Since then the laptop hasn’t started up on its own again (so far) so I guess we are good for now. Dad’s happy that the laptop stays shutdown when he turns it off and I don’t have to take it to a hardware repair shop to get it fixed which would have been a pain.

The next item on my repair list is my N95. I think I need to update the firmware on it but before that I will have to backup all the SMS’s, logs, etc etc on it. Plus all the programs I have installed. So that’s a task for another day.

– Suramya

Three days ago one of my hard-drives decided it was time to stop working. The irony of the situation is that I was in the middle of backing up data off that drive when it stopped working. I was happily copying data from the disk to another system when I noticed that a couple of files weren’t copied because of read errors. At first I let the copy continue, then I thought let me run a disk check on the drive first and then I can copy data off. Bad Move.

Once I unmounted the drive none of the tools would recognize it and I couldn’t access any of the data on it anymore. I tried to make a disk image of the drive but even after letting the process run for 2 days it had only imaged 16 MB (The drive was 80 GB) so I cancelled it. If I had let the copy process run I guess I could have copied most of the data off it before it failed.

Now I can’t even get the system to identify the drive. I have a backup of most of the data so its not critical that I get access to the drive but its a good learning experience. So I am going to try freezing the drive and see if that will let me get the data off.

I will document my attempts and will share it over here over the next few days.

– Sur