From joshua at eeinternet.com Mon Aug 13 08:57:30 2007 From: joshua at eeinternet.com (Joshua J. Kugler) Date: Mon Aug 13 08:57:52 2007 Subject: [Uaflug] SCO is done Message-ID: <200708130857.32740.joshua@eeinternet.com> In case y'all haven't seen this: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070810165237718 Summary: Novell owns Unix copyrights, and SCO ows Novell LOTS of money for Microsoft and Sun licenses. j -- Joshua Kugler Lead System Admin -- Senior Programmer http://www.eeinternet.com PGP Key: http://pgp.mit.edu/ ID 0xDB26D7CE PO Box 80086 -- Fairbanks, AK 99708 -- Ph: 907-456-5581 Fax: 907-456-3111 From joshua at eeinternet.com Mon Aug 13 14:34:05 2007 From: joshua at eeinternet.com (Joshua J. Kugler) Date: Mon Aug 13 14:34:29 2007 Subject: [Uaflug] [OT] Looking for a serial level converter Message-ID: <200708131434.05807.joshua@eeinternet.com> OK, so this is sort of off topic, but it is for an OpenWRT router, after all. :) I'm about to buy one of these: http://www.ftdichip.com/Products/EvaluationKits/TTL-232R-3V3.htm But before I order it, I'm wondering if anyone locally has one, or knows where I can get one locally. Looking for some of these too: http://www.futurlec.com/Connectors/IDCMH10.shtml Got a good source for them? Thanks! j -- Joshua Kugler Lead System Admin -- Senior Programmer http://www.eeinternet.com PGP Key: http://pgp.mit.edu/ ID 0xDB26D7CE PO Box 80086 -- Fairbanks, AK 99708 -- Ph: 907-456-5581 Fax: 907-456-3111 From ffosl at uaf.edu Mon Aug 13 17:27:57 2007 From: ffosl at uaf.edu (Orion Sky Lawlor) Date: Mon Aug 13 17:27:13 2007 Subject: [Uaflug] [OT] Looking for a serial level converter In-Reply-To: <200708131434.05807.joshua@eeinternet.com> References: <200708131434.05807.joshua@eeinternet.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 13 Aug 2007, Joshua J. Kugler wrote: > I'm about to buy one of these: > > http://www.ftdichip.com/Products/EvaluationKits/TTL-232R-3V3.htm I've been hacking away with USB-to-serial-to-microcontroller stuff this summer for robotics, and I've been quite surprised to find that standard RS-232 (the usual PC serial protocol) actually both sends and receives from TTL microcontrollers without any problems. Officially, RS-232 serial voltages are -12V to +12V bipolar, and TTL is 0V to +5V, so you wouldn't think this would work. But it *has* worked fine on the half-dozen PC serial ports, and three different USB-to-serial converters I've tried-- this makes me think some nonzero fraction of RS-232 peripherals actually use TTL voltages, so ports secretly all accept them. The only gotcha to watch out for is to put a little resistor (like 1Kohm) on the big computer's TX line, since the -12V from there can freak out your TTL input port (a few protection diodes shunting to ground and +5V wouldn't hurt either, but I haven't needed them on PIC microcontrollers). So if you're willing to build a 6-pin harness yourself, you could just use your motherboard's builtin serial port, or buy a $9 USB-to-serial converter from newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812188102 Locally, Geek City has a basically identical USB-to-serial converter, but it's $40. Both of them just plug-and-play under Ubuntu 6, showing up as /dev/ttyACM0. You set the baud rate, parity, and so on with stty: stty raw clocal 57600 cs8 -parenb -cstopb -echo < /dev/ttyACM0 Now you can fling bytes out the parallel port with: echo "Wazzup?" > /dev/ttyACM0 and read them back with: cat /dev/ttyACM0 (Replace ttyACM0 with ttyS0 to use your motherboard's serial port) > http://www.futurlec.com/Connectors/IDCMH10.shtml Got a good source for them? I'd go ghetto-style and saw a 16-pin socket down to 10 pins: http://www.goldmine-elec-products.com/prodinfo.asp?number=G16033 (Electronic Goldmine is my favorite component supplier. They're insanely cheap, and ship USPS here in under a week.) -- -Orion Sky Lawlor http://lawlor.cs.uaf.edu/~olawlor/ ffosl@uaf.edu From themadcellist at gmail.com Mon Aug 13 17:40:11 2007 From: themadcellist at gmail.com (Paul Swanson) Date: Mon Aug 13 17:40:31 2007 Subject: [Uaflug] SCO is done In-Reply-To: <200708130857.32740.joshua@eeinternet.com> References: <200708130857.32740.joshua@eeinternet.com> Message-ID: <6f5baa7a0708131840m1e5034dfo523e74c52204d741@mail.gmail.com> Novel owns Unix, but is also in a contract with Microsoft. I am uneasy. -Paul On 8/13/07, Joshua J. Kugler wrote: > In case y'all haven't seen this: > http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070810165237718 > > Summary: Novell owns Unix copyrights, and SCO ows Novell LOTS of money for > Microsoft and Sun licenses. > > j > > -- > Joshua Kugler > Lead System Admin -- Senior Programmer > http://www.eeinternet.com > PGP Key: http://pgp.mit.edu/ ID 0xDB26D7CE > PO Box 80086 -- Fairbanks, AK 99708 -- Ph: 907-456-5581 Fax: 907-456-3111 > _______________________________________________ > uaflug mailing list > uaflug@linux0.cs.uaf.edu > http://linux0.cs.uaf.edu/mailman/listinfo/uaflug > From joshua at eeinternet.com Tue Aug 14 02:40:59 2007 From: joshua at eeinternet.com (Joshua J. Kugler) Date: Tue Aug 14 02:41:17 2007 Subject: [Uaflug] SCO is done In-Reply-To: <6f5baa7a0708131840m1e5034dfo523e74c52204d741@mail.gmail.com> References: <200708130857.32740.joshua@eeinternet.com> <6f5baa7a0708131840m1e5034dfo523e74c52204d741@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200708140241.02270.joshua@eeinternet.com> On Monday 13 August 2007 17:40, Paul Swanson wrote: > Novel owns Unix, but is also in a contract with Microsoft. I am uneasy. This is true. Maybe MS saw the writing on the wall, and said "We need to be a in an agreement with Novell, because our IP agreement with SCO isn't worth beans." Who knows. j > > -Paul > > On 8/13/07, Joshua J. Kugler wrote: > > In case y'all haven't seen this: > > http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070810165237718 > > > > Summary: Novell owns Unix copyrights, and SCO ows Novell LOTS of money > > for Microsoft and Sun licenses. -- Joshua Kugler Lead System Admin -- Senior Programmer http://www.eeinternet.com PGP Key: http://pgp.mit.edu/ ID 0xDB26D7CE PO Box 80086 -- Fairbanks, AK 99708 -- Ph: 907-456-5581 Fax: 907-456-3111 From jspaleta at gmail.com Thu Aug 16 15:14:03 2007 From: jspaleta at gmail.com (Jeff Spaleta) Date: Thu Aug 16 15:14:23 2007 Subject: [Uaflug] FYI: Fedora 8 to feature Electronics Lab Message-ID: <604aa7910708161614hc9631e4h86d53749e33d1f4c@mail.gmail.com> Good Afternoon, There is a new feature slated to be ready by Fedora 8 that EE's and CS's might be interested taking a look at. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/FedoraElectronicLab The Fedora's Electronic Laboratory includes design tools for * Analog/Digital Simulation * Spice Simulation * Hardware Development (VHDL,Verilog)- Modeling, Designing, Simulation, Synthesis, Verification and Documentation * VLSI (layout, synthesis, Finite State Machines...) * Micro Controller (?C) Programming * Embedded Systems Development This will be available in the Fedora repository as a group definition at some point leading up to the F8 release. Would anyone be interested in helping to test this software collection if installation or livecd media became available for the Fedora Electronics Lab setup? -jef From gwhitton at gmail.com Mon Aug 20 14:28:28 2007 From: gwhitton at gmail.com (Gary Whitton) Date: Mon Aug 20 14:28:53 2007 Subject: [Uaflug] Job Opening - Internet Developer Message-ID: <894963c10708201528w551fa379v34d4a21b5d53d541@mail.gmail.com> Skipped content of type multipart/alternative-------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: Job Announcement.doc Type: application/msword Size: 25088 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://linux0.cs.uaf.edu/pipermail/uaflug/attachments/20070820/07d1cb8f/JobAnnouncement-0001.doc From themadcellist at gmail.com Sat Aug 25 22:23:53 2007 From: themadcellist at gmail.com (Paul Swanson) Date: Sat Aug 25 22:24:21 2007 Subject: [Uaflug] Need a cheap ol' laptop Message-ID: <6f5baa7a0708252323g752cd43ehaad0890ff90752fc@mail.gmail.com> I am fixing to make a server at home, and I only have one computer, my take-around laptop. It doesn't need to be very high-performance, so low-power is also a good thing. Would a laptop make a good server? So, if someone has a spare laptop (with about 64M RAM), I'd like to buy it! -Paul From themadcellist at gmail.com Mon Aug 27 10:39:55 2007 From: themadcellist at gmail.com (Paul Swanson) Date: Mon Aug 27 10:40:25 2007 Subject: [Uaflug] Need a cheap ol' laptop In-Reply-To: <4672.216.115.114.100.1188232108.squirrel@fsfs.email.uaf.edu> References: <6f5baa7a0708252323g752cd43ehaad0890ff90752fc@mail.gmail.com> <4672.216.115.114.100.1188232108.squirrel@fsfs.email.uaf.edu> Message-ID: <6f5baa7a0708271139w36fee726kbe68f973268e773f@mail.gmail.com> I don't expect this server to ever get dugg. I don't expect it to be serving tons of files to multiple people at all hours. I reboot my laptop once a month; it's totally fine with it. I want a laptop as a server because: *It's small *It has a low power consumption *It has built in battery backup, monitor, keyboard, mouse Thank you for all the desktop offers so far though ;^) -Paul On 8/27/07, Flori Stoeber wrote: > > I am fixing to make a server at home, and I only have one computer, my > > take-around laptop. It doesn't need to be very high-performance, so > > low-power is also a good thing. Would a laptop make a good server? > > > > So, if someone has a spare laptop (with about 64M RAM), I'd like to buy > > it! > > > > -Paul > > _______________________________________________ > > uaflug mailing list > > uaflug@linux0.cs.uaf.edu > > http://linux0.cs.uaf.edu/mailman/listinfo/uaflug > > > > In my experience, laptops make horrible servers. Just from when I was > sharing files at the U from my laptop and/or trying to download files. > Unless you have bought an expensive Hard Drive (or high-end laptop), > laptop harddrives simply are not nearly as fast as from desktops, and by > the same token it's impossible to have the OS, swap drive, and data drives > be seperate drives. This means that the hard drive will probably get > bogged down especially during such times when the computer is running > routine maintenance programs. > > Also, small though they are, after running continuously for a long time, > laptop hard drives will get quite hot. In turn, the laptop fan will > either kick in at a high speed, or performance will suffer as everything > heats up. > > These are just my experiences as relating to two different laptops. In my > opinion, even the cheapest desktop will do better for a server. >