xbox finally on the net

A while back I got a modded xbox from a friend of mine, which is awesome. One of the apps from the mod, xbox media center, has loads of nice little abilities like playing music or videos off samba servers, or copying games over via FTP and so on. However, my xbox is nowhere near an ethernet cable when it's downstairs, and I have no TV or RCA input devices up in my room (yet!) So, what we've had to do is take either mine or dad's laptop into the living room, run a long enet cable, and do net sharing, which sort of sucks and is a pain to get working properly, esp. if you want other devices on the LAN to see it, or for it to see the internet.

But today, that all changed...

While cleaning, I came across my Linksys WGA11B. This thing is more or less an over glorified wifi-b to 10baseT ethernet bridge. I got it many years ago (read: wifi-b era) from a friend of mine who thought it was broken, but in reality had just lost the power supply. In attempt to "fix" it, he removed the case, which left me with a board and antenna, which was just enough. However, I never had a powersupply for it. Today however when cleaning when I found it, I had the thought to try it because I actually had a machine for it, the xbox. After a bit of digging I found a generic 12v AC adapter, and hooked it up. The lights lit right up and I had no idea what to do.

A short trip to the linksys support website later, I was downloading the setup application and reading manual PDFs. Basically, you plug this thing directly to you computer via ethernet, you run the application, you enter in your settings, and hit save. As long as you don't press the reset button, you're fine. The main disadvantage to this is that I had to move the wifi-net to WEP from WPA2, so that's been a little bumpy. Other than that it works great and I can now access the xbox whenever, without having to do weird computer crap.

SGI

So I dug out my good old Indigo2 just now, as well as the massive monitor. I think I got this from landon a few months ago, It's an R4400 250MHz, IMPACT MG10 graphics, 192MB RAM, 4ish GB HDD, and a CD drive. Has Irix 6.5 now, which I may reinstall.



Pretty simple setup, works nicely though.

Oh mah god, it lives!

So apparently before declaring it dead and being all bummed out, I should have checked the right speaker's connection to the actually machine. I moved the cable to the front headphone jack and I get good stereo now, but I do wonder if that bad jack is bad or something. I'll have to do more poking around.

R. I. P. Left Speaker

I just now noticed that when playing music on my speakers, the audio seemed to be primarily coming from the right speaker, which is the control, meaning it has the amp and inputs and that stuff, as well as the jack for the left speaker to connect to. Now, this has happened a few times before, but usually the cable just fell out of the jack or something. This was not the case, it was well seated in there. I tried wiggling the cable, I tried checking the audio driver software, I tried playing tons of different songs as well as tones that warble from speaker to speaker.

Guess this means I'll be shopping for a new set of speakers now.

Hrmmm.

Redoing XP on the Athlon

So basically after I got xubuntu all installed on the athlon, I decided to boot back to XP and do something, but unfortunately the install of XP got canned. I don't feel like going into the details because it's so depressing but basically I had to end up doing a COMPLETE reinstall, loosing datas. Most of them were mirrored on the thinkpad so it was ok.

Rain!

Suiting. The second I publish that post, the GX1's updates finish. Tsk tsk tsk.

In other news, it has started to RAIN! Which means the fan in my front window is pulling in deliciously cool air. Mmmmm it's nice. Also, starting to install on the athlon.

Woot! (and rambles)

I just came back upstairs, and the xubuntu install is finished!

[presses enter to reboot]

[waits]

You know, the main disadvantage to having 320MB RAM in an old system like this is waiting so long for it to be tested, I think last time I timed it it took about 40 seconds, and that was with 256MB.

[waits more]

Woot, GRUB :D

Woot again, Xubuntu booting/loading bar! I'm just now noticing this, but the HDD activity LED on the front of the GX1 doesn't appear the be blinking. Odd...

Yay, at the login prompt now! It's funny when your OS starts faster than your RAM tests. I remember when I ran BeOS on this (still do, actually) it took about a minute to boot to the usable desktop, and only the last eight seconds or so was actual BeOS.

[logs in to xubuntu]

Xubuntu 8.04 looks really nice, now that I'm on my home LAN and I have crap deleted off the athlon (I had like 30GB of dupes, lol) I might go for dual boot.

Ok, logged in w/ loaded desktop. Grrr. I can't get more than 800x600@32 on this. I know this video chip & vram can do 1024x768@32. Alas, XFCE4 at 800x600 looks pretty nice honestly. Time to check for updates! ... Woo, updates installing!

Okay while those install I'm going to ramble for a moment. First off I've decided that I need to start tagging my blog posts. Not to make them easier to find or categorize, but because all the cool kids are doing it these days. Weather or not I'm going to go back to all my previous posts and tag them is unclear, but certainly all my future posts will be tagged.

That was enough rambles for one paragraph, and my updates just finished downloading, so while they actually install I'm going to move the my music library off the thinkpad onto the Athlon, because I like having synced libraries. Augh, crap. The thinkpad did the thing again where when I RDP into it from the athlon, it turns off it's internal screen and won't turn it back on unless I force reboot it... *Grumble*

I am, however, becoming incredibly intrigued by the idea of putting Xubuntu on the athlon now though. The last time I tried was when I was in Richmond, and if I remember right the main reason I was turned off by it was because there is only mediocre support for my wifi card in linux. But here at home I'm connected to the straight up gig-e switch, so things are different. I still won't have amazingtastic video drivers or whatever, but all my games are in windows anyways so who cares.

Blarg these updates are taking forever. I think what I'm just going to do is finish this post now, and then slap xubuntu on the athlon. Yeah.

Later Gators.