Geek-out time!

We have here: Windows 3.1 Windows 95 Windows 98 SE Windows XP Mac System 7.5 (m68k) RISC OS 4 (ARM)

All running on Kubuntu Linux 9.04.

The Windowses are running in Virtualbox, System 7 in Basilisk II and RISC OS in RPCEmu.

Only XP is using full CPU virtualisation, it seems to disagree with the earlier versions.

Here’s my wooden terminal again. Changes since I last posted about this are quite a few.

Memory is now at 512MB.

I stuck a slightly bigger heat sink on the processor and removed the fan. It runs fine like this and hasn’t had any overheating problems. The upshot of this is that the machine now has no moving parts and is completely silent!

I got a very short (25cm) monitor cable from Lindy. Made the cables much tidier, but didn’t improve the screen sharpness noticeably, as I was hoping it would.

I added a speaker socket on the back so at some point in the future I can use some external (wooden) speakers without needing the keep the front flap down all the time. I removed the non-working speakers from inside.

I put in an IDE to compact flash adaptor. The adaptor is accessible from under the front flap. My plan is to use the Linux suspend2 patch to resume from an image on the CF card with the aim of reducing the time it takes to get ready. I’m still working on making this work properly.

See also: the front for the original information and iterations one and two of the internals.

Here it is again. This time with the front flap open showing what can be accessed there.

Thanks to more RAM being available and because of the headache I had with making Firefox do what I wanted it to, this now runs a full KDE desktop and Konqueror. KDE also allows nice seamless access to the contents of USB storage devices which can now be plugged in under the flap to the left.

Another thing which works nicely in KDE is Bluetooth, which is something I was intending to build in from the start.

Something which is not so good under KDE is the ability to configure and do certain things without a right mouse click.

See the original front picture and the updated internals picture for more information.

Fitted an external PSU from linitx.com/product_info.php?cPath=24_54&products_id=142 which has solved the heat problems. Added an extra 64MB RAM. Added connectors for USB and audio under the front flap. Tried to fit the insides of a £4 set of speakers, but managed to break the amp I think. The speakers were already glued in place by this time. I’ll try again later with a better amp.

Compare with before. See the front for more information.

This is a 15" LCD touchscreen with a Celeron 633MHz board with 128MB RAM in a wooden case of my construction. The case also contains the PSU. The bottom part of the screen surround hinges down to allow access to the monitor controls. The button mounted on the base is the power button and indicator light.

It has no hard drive and boots using PXE from my server, then mounts its filesystem over NFS. It runs Debian Linux, xorg, XFCE4, Metacity and Firefox. The button on the left of the panel at the bottom of the screen pops up a screen keyboard.

Currently I’m a bit concerned about the amount of heat that builds up from the PSU (reaches 75°C after a while), an external PSU might be required. Also it tends to run out of RAM when viewing stuff on google video (no swap, no hard drive).

Update: I’ve done some work on the insides, see here. It still looks the same on the outside.

Further update: I’ve switched from the above described software to running KDE. More details here.

See the front for more information.

This is before I attached the screen surround. See the front for more information.

See the front for more information.