Posts Tagged ‘Samsung NC10’

FreeDOS on usb stick on Linux – for BIOS update

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

To cut a long story short I managed to get Windows98 dos on a USB stick. I have no idea how to do it again. So i went and found another way - incidentally this is nicer because it doesn't require a license!

Note : This will work on any OS that has dd, so pretty much all of them, but in *nix it's usually allready there!

So take a USB stick bigger than 31MB (unformatted), and then just download, uncompress and write the FreeDOS img like this :
Note : here my usb key is in /dev/sde. It will be wiped entirely. Then /dev/xxx1 will be the DOS partition. After the 31MB the rest of the space can still be used just format it! - Windows won't be able to see it.

wget http://www.madeo.co.uk/FreeDOS-1.0-USB-Boot.img.bz2
bzip2 -d FreeDOS-1.0-USB-Boot.img.bz2
dd bs=512 if=FreeDOS-1.0-USB-Boot.img of=/dev/sde
mount /dev/sde1 /mnt
cp biosfiles /mnt
umount /mnt

Thanks to derek @ http://derek.chezmarcotte.ca/ for the FreeDOS image!

Moblin on Samsung NC10 (Non destructively for other OS’s)

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

This guide is a howto install Moblin V2.1 on a system with a pre-existing OS. In this case Arch Linux on a Samsung NC10.

Use the simple instructions to download the USB image and then use dd to put it on an empty usb stick. Bare in mind that /dev/sdb1 is not a valid device so you must use /dev/sdb. And yes it will wipe the whole usb stick. You'll need a 1GB minimum stick. I did it with a spare 2GB stick but the image is ~750MB so I don't think there's any point trying it with a 512MB stick.

Boot from the stick and select language/keyboard/timezone. Next choose Custom partition layout.

I always recommend this kind of partition layout :

MBR - Any old GRUB on here. Chainloads the other 3 grubs
/dev/sda1 /boot ext2 - 200MB - For Moblin - Grub for Moblin here
/dev/sda2 /boot_nix ext2 - 200MB - For Another OS - Grub for Nix1
/dev/sda3 /boot_nix2 ext2 - 200MB - For Another OS - Grub for Nix2
/dev/sda4 EXTENDED REST OF DISK
/dev/sda5 /home ext3 - you work out how much you want for the other partitions, I like xfs but moblin only uses ext3
/dev/sda6 / ext3 - I put 20GB, but anything higher than 10GB will be fine, you can go alot lower but that's inviting trouble.
/dev/sda7 /nix xfs
/dev/sda8 /nix2 xfs

/dev/sda1 to /dev/sda3 will be primary in this case. You may find the use of ext2 strange but do you really want journalling on /boot partitions? Waste of space in my opinion so there is no need. /home can be shared between OSs so I recommend something standard like ext3.

Choose username/password (the monkey is a very nice touch from the moblin team I have to say)

All you need now is to edit your grub/menu.lst file on your grub installed on the MBR of the drive you boot on and add something similar to this (my /boot for moblin is /dev/sda1) :

title Moblin
root (hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1

Backlight
Upgrade the BIOS to 11CA -

http://www.samsungpc.com/08/products/nc10/firmware.html

You need to grab one of the DOS executables. I used 11CA07D0.EXE under the title 'NC10 11CA / N110 07DO - DOS Executable'
Get the DOS exe file and just run it from DOS using a USB stick (DOS on USB stick guide)
Carefull the BIOS update it starts straight away as soon as the .exe runs. It's also really noisy ;-)
Note : ONLY on bios 11CA
Bug : There is no brightness slider see bug
Just use this to display backlight level (0-255) and the second to set it to somethign reasonable. I like 50/40.

cat /sys/class/backlight/samsung/backlight
echo 50 > /sys/class/backlight/samsung/backlight

Hibernate/Sleep
This actually works straight out of the box. Moblin just doesn't show it. Something to do with not being in the philosophy - Names should be obvious...

pm-hibernate
pm-suspend

SSH server
There is nothing difficult about this but thought I'd mention it
Note : Starting it the first time takes a little while, it's normal

sudo yum install openssh-server
/etc/init.d/sshd start

Hostname
By default your machine will be called username-desktop. To change it edit /etc/hosts with your favourite Text editor
Replace the line like below (should be the last one and replace it with your chosen hostname

127.0.1.1 name.localdomain name