Category: Computers

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My experience with AMD decTOP computer running on Android

I’ve the opportunity to test out a decTOP computer at my workplace today. decTOP was originally produced as a low-cost computer to allow people from emerging countries to access the internet.

Originally, decTOP (formerly PIC) was shipped with Microsoft Windows CE and Internet Explorer 6.0, but recent release changes the BIOS behavior of decTOP, that’s allow it to boot from USB devices (flash drive and external DVD-drive).

This has led me to do few experiments with the decTOP computer. I’ve tried installing it with Ubuntu, then Windows XP, and finally Android.

and I found Android runs nicely on the decTOP without any modifications. The downside is, that currently only Android 1.6 is available for installing on x86 machine.

What happened to Ubuntu?
Apparently I ran into some difficulties in installing Ubuntu on decTOP. With LiveCD image, it is obvious that the 128MB SODIMM ram is not enough to load the desktop interface, let alone installing it. I tried the server edition and it succeeds, but the point is to run a usable Linux desktop out from decTOP machine, and I think Android do shine in this area.

Android drawback?
One drawback though, Android won’t let you save the downloaded *.apk on the remaining harddisk space, you got to use USB stick for that.

android on dectop
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Play Dune 2 Natively on Linux with Dune Legacy

Good news to old time gamers, now you can play Dune 2 on Linux operating system natively (without dosbox or other emulator) with Dune Legacy project. For the uninitiated, (to my best knowledge), Dune 2 is the first RTS game for DOS (by Westwood, then acquired by EA Games) that spawn several other popular games in the genre such as C&C, Red Alert, Red Alert 2, etc.

Youtube video of Dune Legacy :

The Ubuntu binary (playable under Lucid Lynx) is available from – http://www.myway.de/richieland/dunelegacy_0.96_i386.deb and http://www.myway.de/richieland/dunelegacy_0.96_amd64.deb

Naturally you would need the original data files and maps to play Dune Legacy natively on Linux. Binaries for other operating systems (Windows, Mac OS X) are also available from the Dune Legacy Project website.

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Winbond W89C35 VID:0416 PID:0035 USB Wireless Driver

Dear readers,

I’ve uploaded Windows XP driver for Winbond W89C35 as it can enable the use of Winbond USB wifi dongle (VID:0416 PID:0035) under Ubuntu Lucid Lynx.

Follow the step-by-step instruction as outlined in the Ubuntu Wiki page, in order to use the driver with ndiswrapper.

p/s: I’ve uploaded this driver because I find a lot of websites out there that offers fake Winbond W89C35 drivers.

p/s 2: Of course I would recommend the rest of the users out there to buy a more Linux-friendly USB wifi dongle, such as from TP-Link
, D-Link, Netgear or TRENDnet which I found to be very portable across operating systems.