qptech blog

Well, I got some GUI up, but I'm still compiling some applications (Mozilla Firefox, Open Office, and mplayer). I could have had it all done yesterday, but I'm trying to get the latest versions of these things, which means that there are some broken dependencies, so I gotta sort those out and recompile some other stuff. It seems to be going smoothly now though.

I'm writing this from a simple GUI running the Konqueror web browser. I got KDE installed Though I'm not using it yet because this is my first attempt at running X and I just wanted to make sure that it works right before loading KDE. X seems to be working right, I got it running at my laptop LCD's native resolution of 1280x800 (wxga) using the open source ATI Radeon drivers. I'm using a USB mouse right now, and I should have the touchpad working on the next reboot. The mouse scroll wheel works. I got some truetype fonts installed. Everything's looking pretty good.

Time to reboot and start KDE

I played with Underground Desktop for a while - it's a good little distro, but I decided that it's not for me. I'd recommend it to anyone with fairly standard hardware (desktop pc and wired internet connection) and little or no previous linux experience.

Underground has a nice graphical installer that walks you through all the steps required to install. It's a little more complicated than installing Windows (well, if you ignore all the stupid stuff you have to go through to install windows - like activation and the stupid first time tour junk). The extra complication is necessitated by the greater flexibility of the operating system - GNU/Linux is not just for home/desktop computers - it can be used in embedded devices like cell phones, PDAs, network routers, or pretty much anything with a processor that requires software and an operating system (these things do all have operating systems, it's just that we don't usually think about it - and we shouldn't have to. I bet you'll be thinking about it if your PDA is running Windows CE and crashing all the time). So most linux distributions don't assume too much - if you're installing a distro like Underground Desktop, it's assumed that you're going to be using it as a desktop operating system, so they make a few assumptions - that you'll want a Graphical User Interface, for example. But lots of things are left up to the user to determine - like disk partitioning, perhaps package (software) selection.

However, I've been using gentoo linux on my desktop(current and previous) for quite a while now and decided that it has a few features that I'd like to have on my laptop as well. The reason I didn't install it in the first place is the need for an internet connection to install (you can get a basic setup without it, but it's not much) and the need for wireless networking on my laptop. Of course you gan get wireless working in gentoo, but I thought that maybe the more standardized distros would have the wireless networking setup a no-brainer. KNOPPIX has wireless networking setup so that it just works, but Underground is not quite to that point - too bad KNOPPIX isn't quite suitable for everyday use.

Gentoo is just about the most flexible of all the distros that I've tried - most of the packaged ones like Fedora, SUSE, Slackware, Underground, etc have a set collection of pre-installed software (Desktop Environment, Web Browser, etc)(and, of course, a mechanism to install anything else after the OS is installed). Gentoo has a very basic base setup - it doesn't even install a GUI (you gotta choose one and install it yourself). Gentoo doesn't even choose simple things like system logger or cron daemon for you - these are things that you don't ever think about (or know about) if you're just using a packaged distro in GUI mode - a real Unix hacker will know about them (and they're about the only ones who'd really care). Gentoo makes software installation/updating pretty easy (if you're comfortable with a command line), and everything is compiled from source - so it take a while, but it's more customizable.

Oh yeah, that's another reason I was going with Underground instead of Gentoo - Gentoo takes forever to install - I'm still installing it in fact. I don't even have a GUI installed. I'm writing this post from a console based web browser (links). It looks kinda funny. It's all text and no graphics. Page navigations is a bit funny. But Gentoo does give you a really nice system once it's all installed (if you know what you're doing).

On my last desktop, I didn't want to install one of the standard Desktop Environments like KDE or Gnome because the hardware was a bit out-dated and those things are kind-of resource intensive, so I installed a fast little Environment known as xfce4. It was sweet at the time, lightweight and fast, but it also looked pretty good and had some nice features. I don't use it anymore because my hardware these days can easily run KDE (though I turn off all the fancy animated menus and junk).

Well, that's about enough for this post - my pre-gui install updates are still compiling (I'm updating the base install to the most current before installing the gui).

Web browsing with Links is fun, you should try it - I think there's a windows version.

Oh, I am in console mode, but I'm not running at 80x25. I've compiled the kernel with svga support and it's running at somethingx50. I don't know the exact resolution but I got 50 lines. It's probably more than 160 characters wide because I got a widescreen lcd on my laptop. whatever it's running at, it's a 1 to 1 pixel ratio from the console font to my laptop's native resolution (1280x800) - which is nice because running a console at 80x25 looks funny because it doesn't map evenly onto the native resolution so there are a few pixel rows that are wider and it gives a strange fuzzy look to the letters. They're nice and crisp now though.

So I resized my partition and it crashed half-way through. I recovered it and did not notice any problems right away - windows booted after running scandisk which did some repairs. Windows seemed to be running normally and everything. I didn't notice any data corruption (I do have a backup just in case).

Then I tried to use my map software. It was totally messed up. The GPS part works fine. It shows where you are, shows the roads, and everything. But it can't find a city if you type it into the route start/stop bars. You can move the map around and find the city, then set it as your start or stop. It also can't seem to find any restaurants or anything.

Alright, this must be caused by some data corruption because it happened right after resizing the partition. That's easy, I got a backup. The problem is that I backed it up to a ReiserFS partition (which is greek to windows). And linux can't reliably write to a (piece of crap Microsoft) ntfs partition. That's not really a problem though because I have a flash drive that's fat32 which both can read and write. But there's another problem. The flash drive is 1 Gb. The map data is 1.6 Gb. I could do it in a few steps, but there's a better way. Instead of using the flash drive, I got rfstool which lets you read a reiserfs partition from windows (It's pretty crude - you can't browse it like a regular windows file system - all access is through a command line tool, but it works) And it worked - the map sofware seems to be working correctly now.

Software in development to colorize photos and movies. It looks pretty cool. They have some samples that have been colored, but I don't think there is any demo or anything to download.

I finally installed linux(a probably outdated underground desktop distro) on my laptop.

It was a bit tricky because I didn't want to reinstall Windows (I need Windows for my GPS software), but the windows partition is taking up the entire harddrive.

So I had to resize the windows filesystem, then repartition the harddrive to allow space for the linux partition, then install linux to the freed space.

I resized the windows(ntfs) filesystem with the ntfsresize tool in the open source ntfstools package. This is a bit dangerous (I first backed it up of course) because if the system crashes (and mine did - I left it sitting on the bed and it overheated and shut off because it couldn't get airflow through the fans on the bottom) it's possible to destroy the filesystem. Thankfully, it wasn't damaged much, so I could repair it and continue with the resizing operation.

Now the filesystem is smaller, but the underlying partition still takes up the entire drive. So now I have to change this, and at the same time create the linux partitions (a second one for swap). This is done with the linux fdisk program. It's very simple, but you gotta make sure that the new ntfs partition starts at the exact same place and is large enough for the filesystem.

I was crossing my fingers when I first booted to Windows after doing all this - it ran scandisk without any problems (ntfsresize sets the flag to run scandisk). Then booted and everything was fine.

Then I installed linux - piece of cake with the Underground Desktop install disk. The only problem is that it's just a basic setup. I gotta download updates and several applications. I'm not worried about getting this all done in a hurry. Just getting linux installed without destroying the existing windows installation was the tricky part. The rest will probably take a while since I'm working some long hours and don't have much time to play around with it.

Hydrogen, because it does not occur naturally in large quantities, is not really an energy source, but simply an energy carrier. It takes energy to produce hydrogen; the energy drawn from the hydrogen, because of inefficiencies is less than that required to produce it. So the source of the energy used to produce the hydrogen is very significant. If the source involves the burning of hydrocarbons, it is no more environmentally friendly than conventional gasoline burning cars - except that the release of dangerous substances may be better controlled and the design of hydrogen burning cars may be simplified (no catalytic converter for example). Only when produced by nuclear power, solar power, or another environmentally friendly alternative can the use of hydrogen as an automotive fuel be more environmentally friendly.

This article proposes the use of Boron as an energy carrier. It's a very large article, but here are a few key points.

-Boron is not combustible under normal conditions, so it is much safer than hydrocarbons or hydrogen which can ignite in an accident or from a leak.

-Boron carries a rather large amount of energy by weight.

-The byproducts of boron combustion are solids which can be collected and transformed back into boron.

Read the article.

You may have read about the Israeli company that's developing a car that produces hydrogen from water and (aluminum or magnesium).

The article claims that the car's performance will be equivalent to that of a conventional gasoline burning car. This seems hard for me to believe. The article states that the metal coil required for equivalent range would weigh some 200 lbs. What about the water? Unless the system does not emit the water produced from burning and instead recycles it through the "metal-steam combustor" to again split off the hydrogen, I figure they need about 38 gallons of water to provide the range of a 15 gallon gas tank. If they do recycle the water, the same hydrogen atoms will be used over and over again - combined with oxygen being drawn from the air. In this case the size of the required water reserve is insignificant and the car will actually gain weight as it oxidizes the metal, effectively combining it with the oxygen drawn from the air.

Also there must be some method for initializing the metal-steam combustor. The system requires intense heat to oxidize the metal. This heat is apparently produced by the burning of the hydrogen. There must be some fuel reserve to get the system up to the necessary temperature to oxidize the metal. There could be some kind of hydrogen holding tank which is refilled during oxidation, but it seems that the size of such reserve must be fairly large to allow the system to reach the proper temperature. Also, if the car is shut off before the reserve has refilled, it would be possible to deplete the reserve to the point that the car can't run long enough to begin the oxidation. The other possibility is an electric heater that is powered by a battery which is recharged by an alternator. I am assuming that the metal-steam combustor is very small so that the mass of the combustor could be heated by the electric heater rather rapidly and with relatively low drain on the battery. Perhaps it would be roughly equivalent to the drain required to start a conventional engine. In this case, there may still need to be a hydrogen reserve, but it wouldn't need to be very large.

The main problem that I have with this approach is the efficiency of the oxidation process. How much energy is required to cause the metal to oxidize (with steam alone) at a rate that will produce enough hydrogen to run the whole system and power the car. If it takes more energy to oxidize the metal than is obtained from the burning of the hydrogen obtained from the oxidation, then the system is impossible. It seems, to me, like a fancy perpetual motion scheme.

I could be wrong - I need to do some research on oxidation.

There is very little information (on the internet) about the company Engineuity R&D LTD, the technology they are developing, or the state of the development.