Tomáš Pospíšek's Notizblock
I'm trying to run my HP 6710 series laptop in a camper.
The laptop is sucking far too much power - the main reason is that it contains an AMD Seymour Radeon HD 6400M/7400M Series discrete graphics chip that apparently can't be switched off and completely randomly switches itself on and empties the laptop batteries within about 10 minutes.
So I need to recharge it. Often. That HP laptop is a real shit.
First try with recharging in my camper was with a 12V to 220V inverter. However that setup is apparently wasting so much power in the 12V -> 220V -> 19.5V -> battery charging process that the camper battery is emptied rapidly.
The camper battery is a larger than usual one, and it is separate from the engine starter battery. However due to unknown cause - maybe the camper internal charging system is not well designed or maybe the cabling has rotten over time - the camper battery is charging extremely slowly. So the laptop will empty the battery faster than casual traveling will be able to refill it.
So I tried a 12V to laptop tension transformer (15-24V). The outcome is similar. The laptop is pulling current too hard.
While testing the power supply I pulled out the laptop batteries to check whether maybe the laptop can be operated directly from its 19.5V input instead of needing to go through the intermediate battery charging process. It can't. What a shitty HP laptop.
But in addition, pulling out the batteries was able to break the ext4 filesystem. It wouldn't be able to find its journal any more.
In order to fix that I had to:
- boot from puppy linux from an old 2007 USB stick that I
still had around
- puppy didn't support ext4
- couldn't access the wireless card
- download an e4fsprogs RPM with a static e4fsck version
onto my android handy and extract it
- ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/centos/5.10/os/x86_64/CentOS/e4fsprogs-1.41.12-3.el5.x86_64.rpm
- it actually isn't static, but fortunately still works with a 6 year old glibc...
- rpm2cpio e4fsprogs-1.41.12-3.el5.x86_64.rpm | cpio -vid
- put the handy into USB storage mode when connecting it over USB to the laptop booted into puppy linux
- transfer the e4fsck binary to the puppy linux live filesystem
- check/repair the laptop filesystem with it
Some additional things that would not work in the process:
- Huawei handy would not export any useful filesystem that I could copy stuff onto
- microSD adapter for transfering files would not work
- the USB stick would randomly not boot or get stuck
- puppy linux Xorg would randomly not start
- the handy would not connect to the laptop with various cables
- the Huaway handy's browser keeps on insisting that there's not enough space on it's data mediums allthough there is
- the handy's browser doesn't handle ftp
All this took the larger part of a day. Now at least and last I have a working computer again.
Computer technology seems mostly broken these days.
And we're not even exploring the fact that most of today's applications are addicted to the internet and or are required to report back to the spy big brothers in the background without interruption and so are mostly unusable when you are in a offline place on this big earth.
Tomáš Pospíšek, 2013-10-30
