Published on
23rd July 2007 in
News.
GPRS is a common internet connection that mobile (cell) phones have but the down side is that it costs a lot of money as you are using the mobile phone operator’s network. I have a Laptop running Mac OS X 10.4.10 Tiger and a Sony Ericsson K750i mobile phone. I have set them up to use bluetooth to connect to dial-up internet provided by Heart Internet for 10p/min with speeds of 9.6Kb/s. I wanted to use GPRS because it has a faster connection speed than dial up and is charged for data transfer instead of time. I connected the phone to my laptop using the USB cable and it showed up fine in the network settings. The problem is there is no way to get it to use GPRS, only dial up. I went to www.taniwha.org.uk and downloaded the scripts of my Sony Ericsson phone and copied them to /Library/Modem Scripts. In network settings these new scripts showed up under Modem. I found that CID10 worked on my K750i phone.
Now you have your mac set up to use the phone as a GPRS modem you need to set up the ISP details. There you type the number to dial for dial-up internet I entered pp.vodafone.co.uk as I use PrePay Vodaphone. If you want to send email from your mac using GPRS then set up the SMTP server as send.vodafone.net. There is a like on www.taniwha.org.uk that show you all the settings of many of the mobile network operators throughout the world.
Published on
20th July 2007 in
News.
This week I have been mostly working on a cluster. A cluster is a group of computers that work together to perform a task. A node is a computer that is part of the cluster group, I started with two of them and I have three at the moment. My aim for the cluster was to have a virtual super computer on which to compile software and perform some other powerful tasks. I have got PVM to work but that was unable to run my PERL program on the cluster so I started with HeartBeat when my friend (Kz) suggested distcc, This is a program that distributes the compiling task across the network to computers with it installed on. This is just what I wanted for compiling the linux kernal as it should be faster with three computers working on it than one. The computers that I am using are an AMD Athlon 900Mhz, Intel PII 350Mhz and a Freescale PowerPC G3 350Mhz running Kubuntu 6.06 and Debian 4.0 on the latter two.
Published on
14th July 2007 in
News.
Over the weekend I had an old Pentium 4 Dell machine to fix for a friend of my dad’s. I was told that the DVD drives stopped working and that the RAM was having problems. I check the RAM and it was fine and then I corrected the jumper configureation on the DVD drives and plugged them in. A test with a Linux live CD showed that the hardware was working fine. The computer failed to boot to Windows XP from the hard drive as it would flash up the Windows XP loading screen and then restarted. This was easily fixed by booting from an XP install disc and runnings some commands. Now all that is left to be done it to return the computer to it’s owner.