Dave’s List

I was trying to setup a buddy’s old laptop to run Ubuntu and wviewweather, and having no luck because his CD-ROM drive was flaky. So i found this great utility (OK, google found it) that sets up a USB flash drive so that it will boot as if it were the CD-ROM. This is: UNetbootin. Tell it where to find the ISO, tell it where your flash is, and ta-dah! Great utility.

No, copying the files from the ISO onto blank USB memory stick doesn’t work, in case you were wondering…

To give a little more detail, wview now supports a very inexpensive weather station, the La Crosse 2310 (I bought it for $120 including shipping off eBay). This is great for those who want to participate in CWOP and can’t afford or don’t want to spend the money to get a $400+ Davis Vantage weather station, and have an old PC with a serial port lying around.

I wanted a silent weather server to run wviewweather on, to go with my new Davis Vantage Pro 2.

In view of the latest problems Vonage has been having (they are involved with litigation with Nortel, Sprint, Verizon and SunRocket), I decided to go somewhat farther afield to seek out an alternate solution.

To serve as both servers, I bought ($79 eBay) a tiny Cisco NSLU2 (known to the hacking community as the SLUG), a tiny little linux server (designed just to share USB HDDs), along with a 4 GB USB memory stick ($34 CompUSA). I’ll post details and instructions when I get it all working.

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Finally got my first LINUX server up-and-running for the fire department. It’s a great indication of how some distributions are much better than others. Read on to see how it progressed.

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