Acer Aspire 5315 Laptop/Notebook BIOS

Greetings Earthlings,

This is an account of the nightmare i encountered after i decided to breathe new life into an aging laptop/notebook.

I had an Acer Aspire 5315 laptop / notebook which had come per-installed with Microsoft Vista Home Basic. I thought to myself "i know how to fix this monstrosity!!"


This was my plan:

1. download  Xubuntu 12.04 LTS image from:  http://xubuntu.org/getxubuntu/
2. Use unetbootin to create bootable usb removable drive  http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
3. Boot from usb removable drive (after checking the bios to ensure usb drive was the first boot option)
4. Install Xubuntu 12.04 to hard drive using the entire Hard Drive (80GB) (completely eradicating  Vista)
5. Reboot. Enjoy!

These were my issues:

1. Acer Aspire 5315 refused to boot from usb drive. Ok that ones easy burn a CD and do it the slow way.
2. nearing the end of install computer just shut off completely. No warnings. No shutdown sequence. Nada!
3. Rebooted with CD and tried another install, same thing happened.
   the install seemed to go off after the main install had finished and it was downloading updates from the web. (i enabled networking in the install)
4. Rebooted with CD and repeated install but this time disabled networking. Same thing . Shutdown without warning.
5. This time i booted without the cd just to see if the system installed at all.
6. Got a no bootable device found message
7. Googled and read i may have to set the boot flag manually by using GParted from the live CD (the try Xubuntu Option on the CD)
8. I did this and viola!! it worked....BUT!!!!!
9. after about 15 minutes...
10. SHUTDOWN AGAIN!!!! 
11. Back to my best friend Google. 

It turns out the Acer Aspire 5315 uses VISTA ONLY SOFTWARE to control and monitor  the cpu fan (ePower from memory???) when running xubuntu the fan was NOT WORKING causing the laptop to overheat and subsequently SHUTDOWN , you know, to protect itself from melting.



The fix for this is Easy. (so it seemed, but more on that later). All i had to do was Update the BIOS.

Here's the link BIOS UPDATE LINK  Or if you paranoid goto: http://www.acer.com.au/ac/en/AU/content/drivers
and do it yourself.

Now heres the REALLY ANNOYING PART. the BIOS flash utility needs to be run from WINDOWS But you see i had gotten rid of Vista during the install of Xubuntu. I thought it was absoulutley ridiculous that i may have to reinstall Vista just to accomplish a task that should take 30 seconds. (OK maybe 1 Minute. sorry for the exaggeration ) Then i stumbled upon a tool that SAVED MY DAY!


The answer to my prayers was:

http://www.hirensbootcd.net


It's a boootable CD that has a thing called "mini XP" which you can run windows programs from. I burned a CD popped it in The Acer Aspire 5315 booted up Choose the mini XP option and in about 30 seconds had a xp desktop put my usb stick in that i had copied the bios update to ran it (after extracting it) and let it do it's thing.



IMPORTANT: make sure you have power connected to the laptop you DO NOT want to interrupt the BIOS FLASHING PROCESS. while on that note it's probably a good idea to let the laptop COOL DOWN first in case it shuts off while Updating the BIOS.


Well i rebooted and all is SWELL i left the laptop on for 2 hours running a openGL screensaver and it aint even warm!!!


I HOPE this post finds some poor soul who needs to update their Acer Aspire Laptop / Notebook BIOS without WINDOWS installed on their hard drive.

Add Windows Fonts To Linux

To add windows fonts to your linux distro:

You should mount your windows partition if it isn't already.

Mine is mounted at "/media/win"

from a terminal type somthing like: "sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/win"

Now to add the fonts . . .


from a terminal:
cd to your home directory: cd ~
then type: "sudo ln -s /media/win/WINDOWS/Fonts .fonts"
And finally: "sudo fc-cache -f -v"

Flash Video (flv) lesson

Greetings earthlings,

This post is about a little (huge) problem i encountered whilst attempting to stream, via http, a 35 minute flv video on a remote server using the latest and greatest  jwplayer. The weird thing was everything worked flawlessly on my local sever (localhost / 127.0.0.1) but when i uploaded the file via ftp (gftp) to the remote site, the page containing the video would just show a blank screen and if i right clicked whilst hovering over it, the context menu
showed: "movie not loaded", and below that: "About Adobe flash . . .".

I tried using relative paths, then i tried absolute paths. Still, the blank screen remained. I scratched my head for a long time. Then suddenly, i remembered a piece of information i had retained from my younger days and it solved the problem instantly!

What was the problem?

I had uploaded the flv file (also the swf player files) using FTP in ASCII mode instead of BINARY mode.

I hope this info helps someone. i put it here in-case i forget

That's all folks

Brasero Audio Cd's

The other day i was asked to burn a audio CD for someone. I thought to myself:

"cool now i have a chance to check out Brasero"   

(Brasero is a CD/DVD Burning App for Linux)

After selecting:  "audio project" and adding my files, I was ready to burn. I swiftly clicked on the "Burn" button. Then to my surprise a dialog box popped up and it read: "Normalizing Tracks". I thought "OK that doesn't sound too bad, I only have one 20 minute track". However, after 30 minutes I asked myself: "How can this be taking so long? This is ridiculous". I gave it another 10 min and decided to cancel the job.

The thing is this: Brasero actually does NOTHING when you see this dialog box.
It just sits there staring back at you and never normalizes let alone burns anything.

(BTW: Normalizing Tracks ensures a constant level of volume between tracks.)


Here's what I did to fix (workaround?) the problem:
Click on "Edit" -> "Plug Ins" and then uncheck (disable) "normalize".

After I had done that, the CD was burned without a problem.


Happy Burning! :)

Google Joke

I found this and thought it was funny:
click here

Intentions

Greetings Earthlings!

Well, well, it's finally come to be that I have decided to join the blogosphere after 15 years online.
You see, I think a lot. Mostly about pointless things, but I have decided I will try and share 
the more useful "tid bits" I have flying around in my riotous mindscape. 


My intention is to write about topics including (in no particular order):


Music, Art, Science, Software, Hardware, Web Development, 
Graphics, Ranting, Raving, "Back in my day...", "Kids these days . . ."
and a whole lot more. . .


So stay tuned for updates. . . 


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