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Resourceful folk, might admiringly say this was "Mickey Moused," or "MacGyvered."[/caption]
A street fellow came up to me in McDonalds this evening requesting some help with a Samsung netbook he'd fished out of the garbage.. He explained It had a password, but he knew something which would get around that -- would I download it for him? I said I would, knowing it wouldn't, couldn't, and shouldn't, be so easy.
It took him a while to get the laptop all set up -- "I had to make a power cord," he explained, as he fiddled with a clearly jury-rigged arrangement of stripped wires, a stretched out key ring, and by golly, a key! When he finally got the wires to stay in place, it indeed charged the laptop. He explained the particulars:
Using an actual laptop AC adapter, he cut off the end which plugs into the laptop's power port (only because it wasn't the right end for his Samsung), then he unsheathed several inches of the positive and negative wires, and stripped an inch-or two of each wire, He took a thin wire key-ring, and pulled it out more-or-less-straight -- he connected the positive wire to about the middle point of this keyring wire. He took a small key, as for a medium-size padlock, and connected the negative wire to the key, where the hole for the key-ring is. The "positive" key-ring wire went into the netbook's power port -- dead center he said. The "negative" key was wedged in a USB port -- to provide the ground, he explained. This wasn't the first time he'd done this.
We fired up the once white netbook, and gazed upon the Windows 7 Starter login screen. Before I went to download whatever password cracker it was he'd heard about (I halfway expected it to be a program called KON-BOOT), I took a particular 16 GB USB drive, that I've set up as a kind of keyring of live Linux OSs, and booted Ubuntu 12.04 on the Samsung. This showed me that Ubuntu understood the wireless driver, and determined that the harddrive was more-or-less healthy. I hoped to convince him to just install Ubuntu.
No convincing was required. "You have Ubuntu? That would solve all the problems," he declared. Great, but did I have an ISO, and a stick I could lend him? I wasn't letting the 16 GB mult-boot stick out of my sight. I used the Windows LiLi USB creator program to put the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 12.10 -- all I had with me -- on an 8 GB stick. The Wi-Fi in Broadway and Granville McDonalds wasn't taking callers, as usual, so he'd have to find a Wi-Fi connection somewhere else. Having done my good deed, I headed off in the direction of bed, and he headed off to find Wi-Fi and install Ubuntu. He promised to return the USB stick, and tell me how the install went. Click the images to enlarge them.
Resourceful folk, might admiringly say this was "Mickey Moused," or "MacGyvered."[/caption]A street fellow came up to me in McDonalds this evening requesting some help with a Samsung netbook he'd fished out of the garbage.. He explained It had a password, but he knew something which would get around that -- would I download it for him? I said I would, knowing it wouldn't, couldn't, and shouldn't, be so easy.
It took him a while to get the laptop all set up -- "I had to make a power cord," he explained, as he fiddled with a clearly jury-rigged arrangement of stripped wires, a stretched out key ring, and by golly, a key! When he finally got the wires to stay in place, it indeed charged the laptop. He explained the particulars:
Using an actual laptop AC adapter, he cut off the end which plugs into the laptop's power port (only because it wasn't the right end for his Samsung), then he unsheathed several inches of the positive and negative wires, and stripped an inch-or two of each wire, He took a thin wire key-ring, and pulled it out more-or-less-straight -- he connected the positive wire to about the middle point of this keyring wire. He took a small key, as for a medium-size padlock, and connected the negative wire to the key, where the hole for the key-ring is. The "positive" key-ring wire went into the netbook's power port -- dead center he said. The "negative" key was wedged in a USB port -- to provide the ground, he explained. This wasn't the first time he'd done this.We fired up the once white netbook, and gazed upon the Windows 7 Starter login screen. Before I went to download whatever password cracker it was he'd heard about (I halfway expected it to be a program called KON-BOOT), I took a particular 16 GB USB drive, that I've set up as a kind of keyring of live Linux OSs, and booted Ubuntu 12.04 on the Samsung. This showed me that Ubuntu understood the wireless driver, and determined that the harddrive was more-or-less healthy. I hoped to convince him to just install Ubuntu.
No convincing was required. "You have Ubuntu? That would solve all the problems," he declared. Great, but did I have an ISO, and a stick I could lend him? I wasn't letting the 16 GB mult-boot stick out of my sight. I used the Windows LiLi USB creator program to put the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 12.10 -- all I had with me -- on an 8 GB stick. The Wi-Fi in Broadway and Granville McDonalds wasn't taking callers, as usual, so he'd have to find a Wi-Fi connection somewhere else. Having done my good deed, I headed off in the direction of bed, and he headed off to find Wi-Fi and install Ubuntu. He promised to return the USB stick, and tell me how the install went. Click the images to enlarge them.
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