Sub-£200 Hackintosh

Here are the specs of my soon-to-be-built hackintosh…

Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L iG31 Socket 775 mATX Motherboard
Manuf Code: GA-G31M-ES2L
£ 32.35

Intel Celeron Dual Core CPU – E1500 2.2 GHz (800 MHz) Socket 775 512kb Cache
Manuf Code: BX80557E1500
£ 34.63

Asus 8400GS Silent 512MB DDR2 DVI VGA Out PCI-E Graphics Card
Manuf Code: 8400GSILENTP512MA
£24.86

Crucial 2GB DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 RAM
Manuf Code: CT25664AA800
£ 34.00

Shiny Piano Black/Silver Slim MicroATX Mini Tower Case With 400W PSU
Manuf Code: 908BL
£ 31.05

Netgear GA311 PCI Network Card
Manuf Code: GA311-100PES
£ 16.49

Sony AD-5240S 24x Dual Layer SATA DVD±RW
Manuf Code: AD-5240S-0B
£ 15.30

TOTAL : £ 188.68

Ok, I’ve cheated a little bit – I already had an old 80GB SATA Hard Drive which I will use for this PC, but they can be picked up for around a tenner on ebay…

Pictures of Hard Drive Swap in Revo

Here are some pictures of swapping the hard drive in my Acer Aspire Revo.

Accessing ADSL Line Stats from o2 Wireless Box III

I can’t find any easy way to access ADSL line stats through the o2-supplied “Wireless Box III” (a Thomson TG585n).

The only way that I could access them is by using this link.

Once you’ve got them, you can copy them into a stats checker such as this one.

This should all work with the standard “Administrator” user (no password), other functionality is available with the SuperUser user – password default is “O2Br0ad64nd”.

Pimp my Revo!

I’ve added some extra RAM and a new larger hard drive to my Acer Aspire Revo so here are the final specs: –

• 1.6GHz Intel Atom 230 CPU
• 2GB DDR2 RAM
• 500GB hard disk
• Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics
• HDMI, D-SUB out
• eSATA
• 6 x USB
• 4-in-1 card reader
• Gigabit Ethernet
• 802.11bg WLAN
• Size: 30mm x 180mm x 180mm

The Windows Experience comes out at a weedy 2.2 due to the Atom CPU but the rest of the ratings look pretty decent for such a low-powered PC (it got up to a maximum of around 34 watts during the tests – normally it hovers at around 23 watts when idling).

Next up – install Linux!

Swapping Hard Drive in Acer Revo

The Acer Aspire Revo has a lot of potential for a home media player but the 160gb hard drive won’t be large enough for everybody.

I spotted a special offer on a Iomega Prestige 500gb Portable Hard Drive which contains (in my case) a Seagate Momentus 5400.6 drive, model ST9500325AS .

I already had a working installation of Windows 7 RC, so here’s how I swapped the hard drives: -

1. Download the Clonezilla ISO file (I used clonezilla-live-1.2.2-14.iso) and install it to USB stick via Unetbootin.
2. Boot Revo with Clonezilla USB stick attached & USB Hard Drive attached.
3. Select “device-device disk/partition to disk/partition” and choose the 160gb internal hard drive (/dev/sda) as the source and the 500gb USB hard drive (/dev/sdb) as the target.
4. Confirm (it asks a few times!) and then wait for cloning to be complete. This will take a long time, as it copies all partitions (on my original hard drive I had 4 partitions – Windows 7 NTFS, Linux ext3, Data NTFS and Linux swap).
5. Open the Iomega USB drive (two screws at the back) and take out the Seagate 500gb hard drive.
6. Open the Revo & Swap the hard drives (see forum post here).
7. Swap the drives and re-assemble the Revo and portable hard drive.
8. Boot up the Revo with the new hard drive in it – it should boot straight up.
9. Extend the partitions to make use of the full 500gb space (this can be done in Windows 7 by going to “Computer” then “Manage”. Go to “Storage” then “Disk Management” and then right-click the drive before selecting “Extend Volume”).
10. Put 160gb hard drive into Iomega case & re-partition hard drive.

Now I have a Revo with lots of storage space, and a spare 160gb portable hard drive for backups etc.

Opening the Acer Aspire Revo

There’s a useful page on opening the Acer Aspire Revo here. Will come in useful for when I add an extra 1GB RAM to the existing 1GB, or maybe swapping the hard drive for a larger one.

Linksys WRT54GL Super Router

I’ve recently bought a Linksys WRT54GL Router. This is a great little unit that allows you to upload custom firmware.

After playing around with DD-WRT, OpenWRT, and Tomato, I finally settled on Tomato. The features are too many to list here so here’s a link to the Wiki.

There’s also a great article on Lifehacker here.

Nintendo DS Lite Homebrew

I have a DS Lite, and its great for running homebrew applications. The easiest way to do this is by buying a TopToy DSTT Multimedia Card (like this one) together with a compatible Micro SD card (such as this one).

After this, its a simple matter of downloading the software, copying the DSTT files onto the Micro SD card, and copying some homebrew software onto it. There’s a great run-down of popular homebrew applications here.

Hard Drive for QNAP TS-101

QNAP TS-101 Telnet Access

The latest firmware (2.3.0 Build 080618) for the QNAP TS-101 has telnet enabled by default.

To access the device, use something like PuTTY to connect via port 13131. The user name is “administrator”, and the password is the administrator that you set via the QNAP web interface.