Friday, April 30, 2004

Free Palm database software!

I find free software hard to resist, so I tried Freeware DB 1.0.4
with VFS and MobileDB plugins. It caused a Fatal Reset (soft reset) within minutes.

Well, it's free!

And I might even try it again sometime!

Wednesday, April 28, 2004

Gooooooooooogle Mail

Giving Google's new Gmail service a spin...

Friday, April 16, 2004

New Tungsten E

Received a brand new replacement Palm Tungsten E today. The battery hadn't even been charged yet.
It may take a while to trust the battery on this handheld again

Wednesday, April 14, 2004

Low Battery again...

Turned on Palm Tungsten E this morning before leaving for work and got "Battery Low" warning.
The battery level was at around 10%. This is no good, as I fully charged it last night.
Returned the handheld to be fixed/swapped.

Saturday, April 10, 2004

Woody and apt-get

This weekend I installed "Woody" twice. The first time I did not read the important information at Distrowatch (here and here).
If I had, I would have read about the secret method of installing Debian with an up-to-date 2.4 kernel (see mini glossary below). So the first time I ended up installing Debian Linux with the old 2.2.? kernel. I also managed to miss the step which installs lilo (the Linux loader), so I was not able to boot into Debian anyway.

The second installation went much better. I made sure installed the 2.4 kernel and LILO to the Linux partition. Once I'd booted up into Debian I used apt-get to download and install a couple of packages.

Then came the setting up of X-Windows(see mini glossary below). The last time I tried Debiam Linux (the "Potato" version) I gave up at this point after trying a few times. This time I was able to look up the X86Free Setup options on the internet on a second machine. The X-Windows setup went without a hitch, and I was soon running KDE.

Mini Glossary
As an aside, for Linux newbies:
kernel - something like the DOS command.com, but supercharged.
X-Windows - think of numerous versions of "Windows" which can be run on top of "DOS". User friendly (and non-free) versions of Linux like Xandros, Lindows and Mandrake configure X-Windows automatically during setup.

Wednesday, April 07, 2004

Low Battery

Turned on my work Palm Tungsten E this morning and got a critical "Battery Low" warning.
The battery level was at around 7% (after being at 88% last night). I couldn't back
anything up to the SD Card, because the Palm OS had disabled access to the Card to
preserve Battery power. Since the charger cable was at work, this was a problem.
Fortunately I didn't lose any data.

What caused this sudden drop in Battery power? It's possible that a button was being
pressed in the generic case overnight.

I’ve also noticed that from within ZLauncher the battery level is flaky, 88% one
minute, 95% the next. The battery life is definitely not as good as the Sony NX60.
On the Palm support site is says "If the battery drains to the point where your handheld does not operate, it stores your data safely for about five days". That's good to know.

Saturday, April 03, 2004

Here we go again

As I couldn't (quickly and easily) find much help on reconfiguring the "Sarge" version of Debian Linux, I erased it, and have begun installing the current stable version 3.0 (or "Woody")...

Status update

Windows XP up and running.
Debian - not yet booting. I have to get hold of some documentation on how to make Debian bootable again (without restoring it). Then go through the whole process of getting a copy of the boot image. Oh well, such is computing...