Blue box

[ewx]

I appear to have acquired a Cobalt Qube. It's very pretty, but currently useless as it's not got a mains adapter. Assuming for the time being that the person I got it off does't pipe up and say they found it, I'm going to have to either buy one (from where?) or bodge some other power supply into service (something for which I have no relevant experience).

So far I've found someone repurposing an HP adapter, a description of the pins and a picture of the missing object.

Comments

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

12V 4A you say? Possibilities are:

- use an AT/ATX power supply if you have one lying around
- get one from Maplin e.g. http://www.maplin.co.uk/Search.aspx?criteria=L10BR&DOY=5m9
- see what you can get from Computer Resale on Mill Road

[pm215]

>AT/ATX power supply

Aren't they likely to be a bit unhappy if there's no load on the 5V line? (Plus for ATX you have to fake whatever magic is required to turn the thing on...)

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

*shrug* Works for me. If it's a genuine problem you can stick a resistor across the 5V line and contribute to global warming. Note that ATX PSUs are particularly good at being "on" despite not delivering any signifigant current, due to the standby mechanism. They can be turned on by shorting the green wire (pin 14 IIRC) to ground.

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

Ah. I must get round to putting Debian onto my Qube...
Along with a reasonably sized hard disk.

I'm very tempted to replace the nasty DIN-stype power plug with a more sensible ring-and-tip laptop-stylee one. What were they thinking when they spec'ed that one?

How much RAM do you have? I have spare stick of the largest DIMM that it will take, if you want it...

[ewx.livejournal.com]

More RAM can hardly hurt though so 'yes please' assuming I don't discover it's fully loaded already - more details when I've had more time to look inside.

I was thinking NetBSD rather than Linux...

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

Actually, looking inside the Qube, and in the anti-stat bag, I see that it's two sticks.

And yes, BSD is an alternative. I've considered puting one of each on different disks (I seem to have a sufeit of discs at the monent). Anything but the RedHat mostrosirty Cobalt shipped, really.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I have one module labelled 16M, and an empty slot.

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

The bare minimum; you clearly need more.
The two sticks I have are 128MB each.
256 being the max the QUBE can take.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

If one or both are on offer I'd be happy to buy them off you (do recall that I'm not a cash-strapped student!) I think a disk upgrade may be in order at some point too, but I'm expecting a spare to appear shortly anyway.

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

Right, just remembered this offer last night, when I was guddling around with my QUBE - which, after a little hassle with dhcpclient[0], now has a running NetBSD 3.0 install on it, and is currently sucking down the pkgsrc tree.

Since I have these SIMMs, and don't need them, I'll send them to you (if they're still of use), no charge. I have way too much stuff and any action that reduces the size of the pile is a Net Good. And it also makes you beholden unto me...

0] Once you've done the net install from the i386 machine, you have to connect via the serial line and ./MAKEDEV all to get the bpf* devices (and others) working right.

Yes please

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Groovy!

[ewx.livejournal.com]

They arrived, and thanks, but they don't fit - they are too wide - DIMM vs SIMM l-(. Mine says Qube 2 on the back, IIRC, perhaps yours is a later model?

(Coincidentally yesterday someone offered me some RAM that they claimed was 'identical' to that in my work PC that turned out to be notched so as not to fit. I must have bad DRAM karma.)

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

Bother!

I have to admit that I'd never tried them in my Qube2 - I was simply handed them, and told that they were the right kind. And when the Qube2 I acquired turned up it was already fully stocked, so there was never any need to try. I don't think I'd even taken them out of the anti-stat.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Ah well. If you want them back, let me know, otherwise I'll try and find a home for them in this part of the world. Maybe they'll fit naath's PC.

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

There's no point in sending them back - I have too much stuff already, and no machines to put them into. Best to see if you can find someone, like [Unknown site tag], who can use them.

[mhoulden.livejournal.com]

Dunno if it's any help, but Cobalt were bought out by Sun a few years back so a Sun dealer might have an old adaptor lying around.

The Cobalt software is now open sourced: http://bluequartz.org/

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

That Cobalt software is only for the i386-based Qube/Raq 3 and above models, not the earlier MIPS-based QUBE & RAQ models.