This is mainly for me, just so I have a place to keep it safe. The original (and best PS3 IMHO) serial # is CECHA01.
I think I would buy another one, just to have a backup.
While messing around with my laptop, I noticed that changing wallpaper was painfully slow due to the poor performance of my laptop's Radeon 9000 mobility card. Doing a little research led me to this link.
Following the steps in the link greatly improved my card's performance. A must if you want to run any of the Compiz Visual Effects, watch "CoCo" O'Brien on Hulu, or, really... do just about anything.
There's currently a bug in Ubuntu 9.04 causing rt2x00 based wireless cards to have their bit rate set at 1 Mb/s. This in turn causes bandwidth to hover around 40 Kb/s. In the past I've manually installed the serial monkey drivers but this time I wanted to still use the NetworkManager applet so I could vpn into my home network. The fix for the issue was surprisingly simple:
ben@Akula:~$ sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-jaunty
After installing the backports, I simply rebooted my pc and my card's bit rate was set to where it belongs - 54 Mb/s. Finally, I can surf at full speed without having to set the bit rate manually!
Run the below command to see what kernels are installed.
ben@Akula ~ $ dpkg -l '*image*' | grep ^ii
Run the below command to remove the unwanted entries.
ben@Akula ~ $ sudo apt-get --purge remove <name of kernel image>
*MAKE SURE YOU DON'T REMOVE THE RUNNING KERNEL!!!*
First download and extract the latest leJOS release. You can find the files here: leJOS Releases
If you don't have the latest Java JDK installed, open a new terminal and install it now.
ben@Akula ~ $ sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
Now install ant, libusb-dev, & libbluetooth-dev
ben@Akula ~ $ sudo apt-get install ant libusb-dev libbluetooth-dev
The next step is to create an environment variable named NXJ_HOME that points to where you extracted the latest leJOS release and to append the lejos_nxj/bin directory to your PATH. Fire up your favorite text editor
ben@Akula ~ $ sudo nano ~/.bashrc
and add the following:
export NXJ_HOME="$HOME/development/lejos_nxj" # Path to lejos
export PATH="$PATH:$NXJ_HOME/bin"
Restart the terminal and check to make sure the NXJ_HOME & PATH variables are set.
ben@Akula ~ $ echo $NXJ_HOME
ben@Akula ~ $ echo $PATH
You should see something similar to this
/home/ben/development/lejos_nxj
and this
/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games:/home/ben/development/lejos_nxj/bin
With the environment variables set, cd into the leJOS build directory
ben@Akula ~ $ cd $NXJ_HOME/build
Run ant to build leJOS
ben@Akula ~/development/lejos_nxj/build $ ant
Before you can flash your NXT, you'll need to add a udev rule to allow your account access to /dev/usb. I created a group named lego and added my user account to it. If you do this, you may need to log off and log back in.
Now fire up your favorite text editor
ben@Akula ~ $ sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/70-lego.rules
and add the following:
# Lego NXT (Make sure you set the group to what you want)
BUS=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="03eb", GROUP="lego", MODE="0660"
BUS=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="0694", GROUP="lego", MODE="0660"
With the rules created, restart udev so they take effect
ben@Akula ~ $ sudo /etc/init.d/udev restart
Test that the new rules are in place and try to flash your NXT
ben@Akula ~ $ nxjflash
That's it! Follow "Compiling and running your first code" in the leJOS README.html and be sure to run through the tutorials on the leJOS site.
I'm a web developer/software engineer living in Minnesota with my wife, Amanda and our black lab, Desiree. I work primarily with .NET technologies during the day and play with Python/GAE/HTML5/JS at night.