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MSN Companion n00b here

New MessageMSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) MercenaryForHire
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Well, I'm a total n00b to IA-1 hacking. Anyone have a "Total n00b" guide to these things?

A friend has a unit - I haven't had time to check it out and see if it's "hackable" - but I just have a couple Q's. (I do know how to determine the "hackablity" - look for cursor and iPaq logo, right?)

- How hard is it to hack these things?
- Is soldering required, or can I pull it off with some USB ethernet wizardry?
- How big is the PSU on these things (considering internal 9.5mm HDD)
- Is a K6-2+ mod ridiculously difficult, or just difficult?

Thanks for the help, and I look forward to browsing here.

Merc

02-14-2002 15:17:34

New MessageRE:MSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) Daxx
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I too have an IA-1 and another on the way. Wife won't let me hack the one. lol
I also have many questions
-I thought that all of them were hackable?
-An OS on a CF works, but if using windows, windows continously writes to itself. and a CF can only be written to so many times. would not be the way to go in the long run.
-I would like to keep the CF working. maybe a mp3 player or floppy.
-HD would be great. usb sound the way to go. or is that a micro-drive? don't know the difference?
-Internal hd would be great but want to keep everything working.
-Does it have to be a laptop HD or will any HD do?
-What about a usb pocket drive. or is there a problem with drivers? or the same as a CF.

Pleas help. Thanks Daxx

02-15-2002 05:37:40

New MessageRE:MSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) GRISHNAKH
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Here are a few helpful websites about hacking the IA-1

http://www.ia1hacking.com/
http://www.php.net/~rasmus/ (has step by step directions on how to get into the bios)
http://www.knipster.net/wiki/index.php/Compaq%20IA-1
http://iahack.tripod.com/
http://thinker.falcons2000.com/ia1/ (good step by step instructions on how to write an image to compact flash within windows2000)

Some of the files you'll want to grab are: dolly.exe, ranish partition manager, and diskprobe. Links can be found from the sites above.
There are few images out there also. Rasmus' jailbait linux, midori, beos, dos, and windows 98. ia1hacking.com has most of those. Just ask around if you can't find them.

02-15-2002 07:04:45

New MessageRE:MSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) DGMage
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Ok, well, we've pushed a lot of the newbie threads out of the top few pages, so I'll go ahead and hit these here, 'cause I'm so damn slow at getting my webpages updated

- How hard is it to hack these things?

Can you make a peanut butter and jelly sandwitch? Can you hack an adder circuit into it? It's THAT easy. (In other words, yeah, it's easy)

- Is soldering required, or can I pull it off with some USB ethernet wizardry?

CF Card is all that's needed. But solder never hurts. It makes it much manlier

- How big is the PSU on these things (considering internal 9.5mm HDD)

16meg Sandisk

- Is a K6-2+ mod ridiculously difficult, or just difficult?

Most people havn't seemed to have problems with it. Only heard of one fry job.

-I thought that all of them were hackable?

No. There's unhackable units, though there's work currently to change the BIOS.

-An OS on a CF works, but if using windows, windows continously writes to itself. and a CF can only be written to so many times. would not be the way to go in the long run.

YEah, unless you wanna fry the CF quickie like, Microdrives are the way to go.

-I would like to keep the CF working. maybe a mp3 player or floppy.

NFS is your friend here.

-HD would be great. usb sound the way to go. or is that a micro-drive? don't know the difference?

The IBM Microdrive is an ittsy bitsy harddrive with pins and heads and all that good stuff that fits in the CF slot. It'll run ya about $130ish for a 340meg drive, there's 1GBs available too.

-Internal hd would be great but want to keep everything working.

What do you mean, everything "working"? Everything works as long as you backup the MSN image.

-Does it have to be a laptop HD or will any HD do?

Regular IDE's have gotten hacked on.

-What about a usb pocket drive. or is there a problem with drivers? or the same as a CF.

Are you talking Disk on Key?


Whew,
Kyle

02-15-2002 13:18:27

New MessageRE:MSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) thinker
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He was asking about PSU (Power Supply) size... In response to your question, the PSU inside the IA-1 is powerful enough to drive at the very least a laptop harddrive and a CPU fan if you wish to add one. This has been proven experimentally.
02-15-2002 15:30:21

New MessageRE:MSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) DGMage
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D'oh, just saw HDD and instantly parsed it as hard drive. :)

Kyle

02-15-2002 15:34:33

New MessageRE:MSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) mezman
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I'm new at this too. However, I would like to ask the experts what I should study given the things I want to acomplish with my IA-1.
1) I have the ramsus image and the recent midori image working as they come configured.
2) I have a cable modem/router/LAN with 4 pc including the IA-1. One of the PC is running apache which is the home webster and general purpose file server (photo, music...).
3) I want to put the IA-1 in the kitchen so it can access web apps from the server. It would be great if it could web brows a directory of MP3s and invoke MMX player.
4)Since the other computers use the DHCP server in the router, the IA-1 should enable this feature so I can access the url of the web server by name (pump?)
5)One of the web apps I run is a random image script. The IA-1 needs the blanking turned off and the web browser must load images at a reasonable rate (unlike opera).
6) And last I want to mount a network drive(s) but don't have a clue.

So there it is. I have run the MP3 player included in the ramsus image, but only from the root command line succesfully. Netscape is very unhappy when run from root. As user, I cant asign mime type for audio.
Midori is great, has a bright screen, a cool MP3 player (would be great if was invoked when clicking on a link). My web photos load real slooow. I don't know how to use all of the extra stuff added to this load.
I know I have to modify certain things in the image in order to make changes stick, but I don't know where to start. Eventually, I would like to learn how to mod and build my own image. I have a un opened box containing red hat linux 7.1 waiting to go into PC #5 to knock around with.

Thanks for listening, hope there is some good advise out there.

02-15-2002 21:03:02

New MessageRE:MSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) DGMage
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Okie dokie, hopefully I'll get all of these right this time ;)
I'm new at this too. However, I would like to ask the experts what I should study given the things I want to acomplish with my IA-1.

> 1) I have the ramsus image and the recent midori image working as they come configured.

Use Midori. Nothing against Ramsus's image, it worked great when we had no other alternative, but you have MUCH more flexibility in making your own custom images with Midori.

> 2) I have a cable modem/router/LAN with 4 pc including the IA-1. One of the PC is running apache which is the home webster and general purpose file server (photo, music...).

Cool, that's what I do.

> 3) I want to put the IA-1 in the kitchen so it can access web apps from the server. It would be great if it could web brows a directory of MP3s and invoke MMX player.

Shouldn't have a problem with that, tried modmp3 or mp3apache yet?

> 4)Since the other computers use the DHCP server in the router, the IA-1 should enable this feature so I can access the url of the web server by name (pump?)

Yup, pump will do it in Ramsus's image, Midori should do it automatically if you set it up correctly in the web setup.

> 5)One of the web apps I run is a random image script. The IA-1 needs the blanking turned off and the web browser must load images at a reasonable rate (unlike opera).

Ok, in Ramsus's image, change the XF86Config file... Edit the "OffTime 2" line to "OffTime 0". In Midori, just drop to prompt and type xset -sblankoff (Actually, make sure that's correct by checking the xset commands, I don't have my IA-1 handy and I'm sleepy. :) )

> 6) And last I want to mount a network drive(s) but don't have a clue.

I'm working on a tutorial for this right now for ia1hacking.com.

> So there it is. I have run the MP3 player included in the ramsus image, but only from the root command line succesfully. Netscape is > very unhappy when run from root. As user, I cant asign mime type for audio.

Midori + Opera takes care of this, it has XMMS.

> Midori is great, has a bright screen, a cool MP3 player (would be great if was invoked when clicking on a link). My web photos load > real slooow. I don't know how to use all of the extra stuff added to this load.

I really recommend that once you learn how to use network drives, start using xv or xli. Opera is shakey at best, and leaving it up for long periods of time is just asking for memory leaks. There's instructions on using xv under Ramsus's image on http://www.ia1hacking.com/, I'll update it for the Midori images tomorrow.

> I know I have to modify certain things in the image in order to make changes stick, but I don't know where to start. Eventually, I
> would like to learn how to mod and build my own image. I have a un opened box containing red hat linux 7.1 waiting to go into PC #5
> to knock around with.

Keep an eye out on http://www.ia1hacking.com/ for instructions and information..

Kyle

02-16-2002 03:49:16

New MessageRE:MSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) mezman
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Thanx Kyle,
You have answered my questions, although there are some new ones. What web setup are you talking about? How is it accessed? I went to the midori web site and read about an icon on the top right part of the screen, of which there is none on the IA-1 image.

I guess once I mount a network drive, I will have more options. At that point I suppose I will be able to run the browser from the network. But it seems that local RAM size restrictions would still limit the type of browser I choose, right? But once that is done I would be able to configure the MIME and other stuff.

I looked at MP3apache, cool! However, the demo files invoked winamp on my pc but would not play.

Thanks again for you input.
Chris

02-16-2002 13:27:15

New MessageRE:MSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) DGMage
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Just got to

http://localhost/

On your IA-1 with Midori loaded, that brings up the configuration.

02-16-2002 14:32:07

New MessageRE:MSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) junkgui
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okay... here is another good question. In every distro of linux I have ever used there was a makedev script that ran and set up the /dev/ directory but in midori that doesn't happen... does anyone know how to 'mknod' /dev/hdc so that I can mount my CF card? Why doesn't it come up on its own and what are the major and minor numbers for it so that I can create it with mknod?
02-18-2002 15:23:22

New MessageRE:MSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) wildwildwes
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You probably won't be able to create anything in /dev since it's read only.

I added the hdc stuff yesterday so the next version will be able to mount the cf slot.

02-18-2002 15:34:37

New MessageRE:MSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) Daxx
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What about usb pocket disk? also called usb pocket pen disk drive. The one that just hooks to a usb and looks like a pin sticking out of the usb.
02-19-2002 05:43:29

New MessageRE:MSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) Daxx
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What about usb pocket disk? also called usb pocket pen disk drive. The one that just hooks to a usb and looks like a pin sticking out of the usb.
02-19-2002 05:43:46

New MessageRE:MSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) thinker
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On Jailbait, /dev is really devfs. The filesystem is created on the fly by the kernel at boottime.
02-19-2002 09:39:25

New MessageRE:MSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) hunter112
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Thanks for all the directions, especially the site with all the pics showing how to get into the IA-1. I did all of this, and am able to access the BIOS, but the screen is extremely light! I can barely make out the words. I didn't see a memory count, but by holding the "Compaq" button down, I can get to the language selection menu, and from there to the BIOS choices. The buttons on the front of the screen seem to have no effect, did I mess something up?

Also, I still haven't figured out exactly how to get an image on to the IA-1, now that I can access BIOS. I'd like a Linux one, now that I've learned a bit about Linux commands.


Hunter112
02-23-2002 15:25:40

New MessageRE:MSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) DGMage
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Hunter,

Check out the "Flashing Your IA-1" page on http://www.ia1hacking.com/ . This gives you instructions on everything you need to do to get BeIA or linux on your IA-1. :)

Kyle

02-24-2002 10:58:21

New MessageRE:MSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) hunter112
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Kyle,
Thanks, but I still have the light screen problem, and this machine is just not useful with that hassle. I unplugged several things to get to the jumper (I just couldn't see it with that damn metal cover on!), so I reattached them, wonder if I bunged something up that someone else has come across?
Hunter112
02-24-2002 12:43:00

New MessageRE:MSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) DGMage
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Have you tried changing the contrast and brightness with the buttons on the front of the IA-1?
02-24-2002 14:24:15

New MessageRE:MSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) hunter112
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Yep, first thing that occurred to me. They seem to have no effect. Looks like I've paperweighted mine. Besides, it still comes up with a faint image of the MSN screens, unless I press and hold the "Compaq" key. I thought it wasn't supposed to do this after the jumper has been shorted. Maybe that's part of my problem, I assumed that the power was supposed to be off when doing the shorting, was I wrong? Also, I had signed this unit up for MSN, and done the update, does it need to be restored to "virgin" condition before the shorting operation?

This "shorting" thing is not completely explained on any of the sites I've seen.


Hunter112
02-26-2002 00:44:49

New MessageRE:MSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) radarman
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It sounds like the previous poster did what I did. The instructions on how to force the flash update are wrong. ALL you change in the post URL is the https to http. The rest of it is already correct. I tried twice with the instructions, and it downloaded an image, but no love. It just hung at the starting screen. I think it may have been the IA-2 imag and not the IA-1.

Give it another try, but this time put the 1-1 back, and just delete the s. You will get the V2 image. (I did)

02-26-2002 07:33:54

New MessageRE:MSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) MercenaryForHire
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w00t.

Midori image #3 up and running.

Now to get my ppp on. :)

Merc

03-26-2002 22:31:16

New MessageRE:MSN Companion n00b here (modified 0 times) MercenaryForHire
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Hmm ... won't let me edit ... ah well, here goes.

Anyone happen to have the WinCE image off their IA-1? I forgot to back it up (silly Merc) and I'd like to have it for "just in case" purposes. (And to see if I can hack it.)

If anyone's got it I'd much appreciate some linkage or FTP.

Merc

03-26-2002 23:31:38

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