computers

November 06, 2007 By borfast 54 comments

Scientific Atlanta Webstar 2203c - how to access locked pages

In my new house, my ISP (Cabovisão) installed a new cable modem, a Scientific Atlanta Webstar 2203c.

It's a stupid modem. Really stupid. If I unplug the ethernet cable (or the USB cable, which I don't use) and plug it into another computer, the modem has to be reset so it can adapt to the new hardware - these were the words from the tech support guy, not mine.

Anyway, I thought that it might have something for me to play with and so I tried to find out how to access the modem.

More

December 16, 2007 By borfast 4 comments

Reducing the burden of updating Drupal modules

Update on Sep. 28, 2008: I will no longer update this script since Drush does this and much more.

Anyone who has used Drupal for some time knows how boring it is having to constantly update modules...

More

October 22, 2007 By borfast 13 comments

Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon blank screen during boot

Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" was released a couple of days ago and I immediately installed it on my laptop, which is kind of my test lab for operating systems.

It looks good so far. Very smooth.

I only had one problem: the screen was completely black during boot and shutdown. I could only see a blank screen during startup or shutdown, and although I could still switch to the other consoles along with the fact that the boot splash screen isn't properly informative, the boot process was taking over 3 minutes. Unacceptable.

I searched Google and after tweaking the keywords once, I reached the golden combination: "gutsy gibbon blank screen during boot"

Turns out this is an already known bug in Gutsy and I quickly found out how to solve it, thanks to the folks at Launchpad:

1) Change the resolution in /etc/usplash.conf to 1280x800
2) Run "sudo update-initramfs -u -k `uname -r`"

Note that the 1280x800 resolution is the "default" resolution for my laptop's monitor - I have an Acer TravelMate 4001 WLMi, with an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700. The resolution for your laptop's monitor may be different.

You may want to take a look at Xorg.conf or go to System -> Preferences -> Screen Resolution to see what you should use in /etc/usplash.conf (assuming the installer correctly detected the supported resolutions, of course).