Michael J. Hammel

Building a better today…because tomorrow is in question…

Hardware

I read a Slashdot post today that pointed to an AP article on Michael Dell returning as CEO at Dell, replacing his previously hand-picked crony Kevin Rollins due to lots of downside to the Dell business. The article had this interesting quip: …in recent years Dell has been stung by […]

Dell and Linux (or Unix): Microsoft still pulls the strings

Thu February 01, 2007 in General / Linux / Via Motherboards tagged dell / Linux (updated 6321 days ago)

I’m taking some of those self-study courses at MIT, including the Introduction to Copyright Law and Computer Graphics. I was going to take the Circuits and Electronics course but a recent Slashdot inquiry got me pointed to some other useful material I may read through first. I have the links […]

Learning circuit design

Mon January 15, 2007 in Hardware tagged graphics (updated 3159 days ago)

Herb Swanson wrote to tell me that my web site comes up first in his Google searches for Aiptek 12000U on Linux. Because of that he suggested posting one of the places where he found more information. The site is Ubuntu specific but it might help users of other distributions, […]

Update: Aiptek 12000U tablet and Linux

Tue October 17, 2006 in Aiptek Tablet / Hardware tagged Linux / ubuntu / X11

My SSR's arrived from an eBay purchase last week. I got a set of 4 10A / 120V solid state relays for about $24 including shipping. Not a great price, but reasonable enough. I was in a hurry to get this done. I haven't tried the SSRs yet, but at […]

Holiday lighting fun

Wed September 13, 2006 in Hardware / Holiday lighting tagged holiday

After about 1 1/2 years on FC2, I finally upgraded my Acer Aspire 1690 laptop. If you read my earlier posts on installing FC2 then you know it wasn't a straight forward configuration to get everything working. I'm pleased to say that is no longer the case. FC5 covers essentially […]

Acer Aspire 1690: FC2 -> FC5 upgrade

Tue September 12, 2006 in Acer Aspire 1690i / Hardware / Linux tagged acer / aspire / gnome / graphics / intel / Linux / MythTV / Video / yum (updated 6805 days ago)

I've got MythTV working with a keyboard now, but the builtin IR receiver and remote are sending signals to the keyboard and I'm not to good with trying to learn how to map the remote into the keyboard driver. I managed to get the down arrow to map to a […]

MythTV and the HP de100c

Mon September 04, 2006 in de100c / Hardware / MythTV tagged lirc / MythTV

A previous post on working with Aiptek and Wacom Graphire4 drawing tablets drew the following response from Garett Harnish: While it isn't "out-of-the-box," here are instructions on how to get the Graphite4 working under linux. The instructions are for a distribution I've never heard of before, zenwalk, but they seem […]

Update on Wacom Graphire4 support

Wed August 30, 2006 in Hardware / Linux / Wacom tagged graphics / Linux / Wacom

Working on an article for LWN.net late last night, I ran into what is apparently a well known problem. The Via Rhine driver in Linux will ocassionally disable the PXE firmware so netboots don't work anymore. I found the solution in an Linux Kernel archive early this morning. […]

EPIA-M 10000 netboot stops working

Sun June 25, 2006 in EPIA-M / Hardware / Via Motherboards tagged epia / Linux / lwn (updated 6886 days ago)

I haven’t been using my Sony CLIE for awhile – certainly not since moving to Colorado or buying my Acer laptop. So now its xmas time and I need to put my family’s xmas lists on my CLIE so I can go shopping. But I find that the USB interface […]

Fedora Core 3 and my Sony CLIE

Sun November 27, 2005 in Hardware / Sony CLIE tagged acer / Fedora / xnotesplus (updated 6679 days ago)

I don’t know how everyone else got them working, but I’ve tried all kinds of combinations of existing and recompiled drivers for the kernel and Xorg. Nothing worked with my Wacom Graphire4. Let’s face it. Graphics on Linux is only as good as the hardware support. And the tablet support […]

No joy – drawing tablets don’t work

Sat November 05, 2005 in Aiptek Tablet / General / GIMP / Hardware / Wacom tagged graphics / Linux / Wacom

The Aiptek tablet failed to work easily on my laptop. I’ve been in touch with the developers and have started to dig into the code myself (it’s somewhat interesting to get involved in such projects, though I’m nuts to do it since I already have too many things to get […]

From Aiptek to Wacom and back: a hobbits journey

Fri November 04, 2005 in Acer Aspire 1690i / Aiptek Tablet / General / Wacom tagged Wacom (updated 7119 days ago)

Glyn Edwards pointed out to me on the Aiptek Users mailing list that the CVS code under unified_package/src/linux_kernel_driver/2.6/ is the same as the 1.9 source. There are other versions in the same repository – the repository needs a little cleaning out to avoid confusion. I checked out the 1.9 and […]

Debugging the Aiptek driver

Sun October 23, 2005 in Aiptek Tablet / General / GIMP / Hardware tagged Linux (updated 7131 days ago)