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Not a Hacker But Questions (modified 0 times) bob839 Profile | Email I posted this under ThinkNic,no response. Maybe here. Not a hacker,just retired Navy using an iopener for convenience. I like the portability of iopener but guts of the NIC. Now to the questions. Without the tools and etc is it worth while to modify the iopener like tclogic did and still have portability?? Or!! Wait for the new NIC version to come out in October. It supposed to have a LCD screen and updates. At least according to rumors. Anyhow,someone give this retiree a bit of good advice. You can also email me at robertmears@iopener.net Thanks Bob 09-26-2000 13:27:10

RE:Not a Hacker But Questions (modified 0 times) vailr Profile That $21.95 per month is an expense you can forego by "hacking" your IO to run Win98, WinME, or similar. Then use a free ISP such as Netzero, altavista, Juno, etc. Adding a laptop HD, getting bios flashed, etc. can be tricky, though. Check earlier posts for details on doing this. 09-27-2000 09:26:57

RE:Not a Hacker But Questions (modified 0 times) Wild_Pencil Profile | Email Let's see... spend an extra $35 for an I-Mod Kit; another $16 for the BIOS Chip; another $100 or more for a decent-sized laptop drive; and another $80 for Win98. $231 is an awful lot of money to be spending to "upgrade" the I-Opener just to use a "free" ISP to get onto the 'Net. That's almost a year's worth of using the upgraded I-Opener with Free ISP (-vs- just using Netpliance's Services) before you see any Return on Investment. Probably better to just hold off for the NIC to come out in October. The I-Opener is a great product and service for what it's intended to be. It's also a cute and nifty PC if you're willing to put in the money to "upgrade" it -- though you will very likely end up spending MORE on upgrading the I-Opener than you would just buying a real Desktop PC. (E-Machines are nice cheap Desktop Machines, for example..) Unless you're a hobbyist, the I-Opener probably isn't worth upgrading. -WP 09-27-2000 15:31:28

RE:Not a Hacker But Questions (modified 0 times) ASPguy Profile | Email I agree with Wild_Pencil, unless your a hobbiest the iopener isn't financially economical for you to modify.. It can really put a damper on your wallet. Take me for example with how out of control this hobby has taken me. I have 12+ iopeners, 5 websurfers, 6 usb ethernet adapters, 3 desktop computers.. all at home. Not to say I had 5 amd 333 afk cpus.. I have a mountain of these iopeners in my gf's bedroom. i can't stand them. hehe -ASPguy 09-27-2000 17:16:09

RE:Not a Hacker But Questions (modified 0 times) spikeorama Profile It doesn't have to be expensive to get the I-Opener to work. I only spent $40 extra on mine and that was for the USB ethernet adapter. I'm running each of my 3 IOs as X-terminals off my Linux workstation. The IOs get their filesystem via NFS mount from the workstation so no hard drive is required. Most of the applications run on the workstation (PIII-450, 256MB) and just display on the IO screens. The one exception is my mp3 player (xmms) which I run locally on the IO to get good performance. Ok, I lied about the hard drive. I bought one hard drive for the first IO to get the Linux images over to it. But, now that I've got them set up, once I'm done tweaking them, I don't need the hard drive anymore (I should have just borrowed one from work temporarily!) 09-27-2000 18:45:53

RE:Not a Hacker But Questions (modified 0 times) preacher Profile | Email Cool idea to run them as X-terminals. What is your set-up on the sandisk? I'm not that familiar with Linux. 09-27-2000 19:15:37

RE:Not a Hacker But Questions (modified 0 times) spikeorama Profile I was originally using Jailbait (a 16MB Linux distro that fits on the Sandisk) but the USB ethernet was not stable enough. I had kernel 2.3.99-pre9 working rock solid with ethernet (and NFS) using the latest pegasus driver patches on the I-Opener with the hard drive. But, I could never get that kernel to work with the Jailbait distro. After replacing lots of Jailbait files and getting nowhere, I took the Redhat 6.2 distro that was on the hard drive and pared it down to about 10 MB. All that is needed on the Sandisk is enough software to boot and then NFS mount the /usr, /home, /var . . . directories from the workstation. There are some Linux HOWTOs on this, NFS-root and NFS-root-client. It took a while to get it all working but I think the setup is now pretty much what I want: a minimal amount of software on the IO, and easy updating because most of the software resides on the workstation. Any applications that require sound (xmms for example), need to run locally on the IO because using esound to redirect the sound from the workstation to the IO doesn't work too well with high-bandwidth audio like MP3s. By running Netscape and other apps on the workstation, I have enough free RAM left on the IO to be able to run xmms without getting into swap issues. 09-28-2000 17:31:41

RE:Not a Hacker But Questions (modified 0 times) bob839 Profile | Email One follow up please. I really don't care about having a hard drive. Main thing I am after is speeding this thing up and more RAM. But most of all is a higher JAVA Where is the JAVA? In eprom or flash? How would I go about changing these items and what do you'll think the cost would be. Netpliance keeps promising an update and keeps putting it off. Thanks for all the help Bob :>) 10-18-2000 06:31:27

RE:Not a Hacker But Questions (modified 0 times) ASPguy Profile | Email Bob839: Netpliance promise you that they'll enable more Java into their browser for their qnz operating system? Well when you modify the iopener, you'll be changing the operating system, so u'll get java and all the good things. okay, here are the cheap ways for you to have an awesome operating system on your Iopener. 1.) You can put the 16 meg linux Jailbait on your iopener, it is free. but unfortunately you'll need a 2.5 inch harddrive and the iopener ide cable to transfer the file over since your version of iopener doesn't seem like the one that can call out. 2.) Get a cheap $40 harddrive at pricewatch.com , $10 ide cable, $6 2.5 inch to 3.5 inch harddrive adapter. So you're looking at the cheapest price at $60. The 2 is how i have my iopeners set up, since i can't afford to put a huge harddrive on everyone on my 12 iopeners. -aspguy 10-20-2000 10:46:02

RE:Not a Hacker But Questions (modified 0 times) ASPguy Profile | Email bob389: If you want to speed up the iopener and still use netpliances isp service, you might be able to upgrade the cpu to an amd 333 mhz. you might have to solder resistors and switches in. you can purchase the kit for like $15 from anyone who sells it. Post to Turbo3 to confirm that you can modify the iopener and still use netpliance's service. -aSPguy 10-20-2000 10:49:08

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