BIOS Updates forum

Ubuntu 10.04LTS installation CD detects PCMCIA 8G CF as a harddisk and allows to install Ubuntu on it.
Don't knw yet how to boot from it, propably from installation CD somehow...

I received Kingston 8GB CF module. Bad news, TP600E does not boot with it in the PCMCIA slot. XP detects it when booted normally from disk but fdisk and ghost do not detect it when booted from Win98 startup floppy. XP install from CD does not detect it. I guess DMA pins are not connected in the PCMC...

Since BartPE can be booted from USB stick I will next try a bit bigger image UBCD4Win that is built with same tools as BartPE.

On the other front I received SanDisk PCMCIA CF adapter card and ordered cheap Kingston 8GB CF module to start experiments with CF booting.

WinToUSB does not produce a bootable image at least for TP600E. Booting slips down to IDE disk.
Have to study more...

I managed to boot BartPE on 2GB USB stick in Thinpad 600E ! Boot starts from IDE Disk (to start Plop boot manager USB drivers) and transfered booting to USB (with Plop boot manager menu). Ifollowed instructions in http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=20089 to prepare the USB stick image ...

I bought a used PCMCIA CF adapter. I have to check if it has UDMA pins routed. What are those UDMA pin numbers?

I am booting from a hard disk that had originally Ubuntu / XP dual boot installed with Ubuntu 10.04LTS. Either Plop or Grub bootmanager (not sure which) come to read boot.ini from the USB stick. I have not yet figured out what to write in the boot.ini to point to the USB disk so that booting would c...

Progress with Plop boot manager. I received confirmaton that it works with USB port of TP600E.
I managed to get get USB detected but I still have to have a XP installed on the USB stick to boot. I already got so far as "NTLDR missing".

I have been exploring ways to run XP or Ubuntu from USB stick. One promising approach is Plop boot manager that has USB drivers in itself. http://www.plop.at Plop in theory allows to boot Boot manager from CD/DVD, detect USB drives, then pass control to an operating system residing on the USB drive....

Throttling seems to have little or no effect on the power consumption. It is still 7-8W under full internet traffic load.
I guess XP is good at using HLT(stopping the processor) whenever there is no work

First experiments show that throttle of 50% is sufficient for the server's PIII 450@300Mhz to run the internet traffic. Effectively this is equivalent to a 150Mhz processor. I have to measure the effect to power consumption.

Utility WinThrotlle http://www.oldskool.org/pc/throttle looks quite promising. I installed it and it allows to slow down the FSB bus and thus also processor. It has many adjustments so I need to study how they effect.

I bought and installed a secondhand ADMtek ADM8511 USB Ethernet adapter and now have 3 nodes working in the home network. Devolo Ethernet-network adapter is now connected to TP600E-server node. Need to get power usage and heat generation still lower. Actually heat is more of a problem since TP600 se...

Looks like dnsmasq-base based Ubuntu sharing of Internet connection does not work reliably even if the installation is disk based. It tends to hang up for unknown reasons. Also there seems to be no difference in power usage so I went back to XP in the server. Another battlefield has been to add node...

Eliminated swap-file so running on physical memory of 256M. System monitor shows about 139M being in use.

Ubuntu command to disable swap is

sudo swapoff –a