Welcome to Austin Godber’s Misc Computer Page

Miscellaneous Computer Information

The Catch-All category for computer related information.

Hardware Tips

A discussion of my general computing platforms with tips and pointers to other information.

Sony Vaio Z1AP

I got this sweet Sony Z1AP Laptop in the Spring of 2003. It came with Windows XP Pro but I made sure its first boot was with a Knoppix disc. It actually booted with no problem which was a bit of suprise since most of the time Sony laptops take some tweaking to get to boot in Knoppix.

I immediatly did a hard disk install of Knoppix and upgraded to Debian unstable. Nearly everything worked for me. The wireless is now legendary for not working (except for those using the Linuxant Driver Wrapper or perhaps the NDIS Wrapper). The other problem I has was choppy sound which was resolved by raising X Windows’ nice level from -10 to 0 in /etc/X11/Xwrapper.

For deatails on getting other things working, check out the following two pages:

For that matter, anyone interested in getting Linux running on a laptop you should check out the links at Linux on Laptops

Soekris Net4521

I use a Soekris Net 4521 as my home firewall and cable modem gateway. There are many nifty embeded Free UNIX like OSes you can use on the Soekris boards. I have used OpenSoekris and m0n0 wall. I have settled on m0n0 wall and have been very pleased with it. It has a very nice interface and has proven very reliable.

I would like to play around more with some other options ... but playing around means my internet is down so I don’t get to experiment as much as I would like.