I picked myself up a nice affordable laser printer today in the Lexmark E250dn.  It’s got the two features I wanted most: a network port and a built-in duplexing.  Since the printer can sit on the network, I can reclaim the PC I’ve been using as a print server and use it as a test platform for other projects.  Duplexing is a real nice paper saver when I need to print manuals and such.  I also appreciated that you can replace the toner and photoconductor separately, which is less wasteful.  And, unlike some others in the price range, it reportedly works "perfectly" with Linux.  (I’ll get around to testing that later…)

I haven’t printed much so far.  Installation was flawless.  There was a slight problem that the printer was faintly creasing the printed paper.  However, I was able to isolate the offending roller, and with a little "thumb maintenance", I corrected the defect.

Well, I hope it lasts a while!

I’ve had a broken Category 5e Ethernet cable lying around for a while that I finally decided to fix. Actually, the cable was fine, but the spring on one of the modular connectors was broken, so it wouldn’t stay in a network jack. Since I’ve never done this before, I figured it’d be fun to document this little project.

Stuff I used:

• Package of RJ-45 CAT 5e Modular Connectors
• RJ-45 Crimping Tool
• Small Wire Clipper (optional)

(Trivial Side Note: Ethernet actually uses 8P8C connectors, but they are almost always referred to as RJ-45, technically a slightly different design. Details, details…)

Step 1: There are two wiring schemes for Ethernet cables, T568A and T568B. Both ends of the cable need to follow the same scheme. Since I’m only replacing one connector, I need to check which scheme the manufacturer used on this cable. This Wikipedia article shows the diagrams for both CAT 5e wiring schemes. Despite my color-challenged vision, I can tell by looking through the clear plastic that this cable uses the T568B layout.  (Of course, both ends of the cable need to use the same layout.)

Step 2: I lop off the defective connector using my RJ-45 Crimping Tool. This is pretty easy. There’s a nasty sharp wire cutter built into the tool.

Step 3: The crimping tool actually has a double blade which also scores the wire housing a half-inch from the cut end. This way, you can easily peel off the leader so that the exposed wires are the perfect length to insert into the new connector. However, I found that I needed some slack. After arranging the wires in the proper order, some were too short due to having been routed in a roundabout way. Perhaps, a seasoned wirer has a magic touch I don’t, but I opted to further expose an inch and a half of wire so that I could make my connection nice and pretty. For this, I used a small wire cutter to trim away more housing. (Nibble so you don’t stab your thumb like I almost did!)

Step 4: Now that I have plenty of wire exposed, I arrange them in the proper order. In this case, I’m using the T568B scheme. According to Wikipedia, this is from Pin 1 to Pin 8: White/Orange, Orange, White/Green, Blue, White/Blue, Green, White/Brown, and Brown.

Step 5: I need these wires cut neatly so that they extend only a half inch from the cable housing. This way when I insert the wires into the modular connector, the cable housing will run flush into the end of the connector while the wires extend fully to the electrical contacts. I use a wire cutter to trim the excess wire so that only a half inch is exposed from the sheath.

Step 6: I orient the wires to the pin positions 1 through 8 of the new modular connector. It’s easy to do this upside down by accident, so I checked the pin positions on Wikipedia again just to be sure. Looking toward the head of the connector with the spring up, pin 1 is on the left side. I slide the wires in. Once they hit their respective grooves, they retain proper alignment all the way to the electrical contacts. Make sure to get them all the way in!

Step 7: Now I place the modular connector into the 8P jack of the crimping tool and give it a good squeeze. This locks down metal blades inside the connector onto each individual wire, thus establishing a circuit to each electrical contact on the plug. Crimping is my favorite step!

That’s all there is to it. Now I’ve got a nice, clean, functional connector. It’s missing the snag-free collar of the original, but a lot of good that did me in the first place, huh? Only thing left to do is to make sure it works. Well, in order to do that, I plug the cable into my laptop and see if I can connect to the network. Voila!

Disclaimer: I have no idea if it is possible to fry your hardware if you mess up your pin outs, so proceed at your own risk! In fact, I’m not stopping you from purchasing an inexpensive cable tester to test your cables properly…so be smarter than me and do this instead of plugging it into your laptop.

That said, mine worked:

The other night I installed Ubuntu, a user-friendly if not the most user-friendly Linux OS distribution, on my mothballed classic Athlon 600. I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about it, so I thought I’d install it on an old machine to use as a file server.

If you’re at all curious, you should know that you can run a full demo of the operating system by booting from the Ubuntu install CD. It runs a virtual machine on your computer without touching your hard drive. I ran a demo to check it out and got thrashed at Chess, one of the many included games.

Ubuntu is free if you download the CD as an ISO image and burn it to recordable media using pretty much any CD writing software. You can also buy CD’s. They’ll even send you free CD’s if you ask, but they say it may take up to ten weeks for delivery.

When I installed Ubuntu from the CD, it was quick and painless! It was so simple. I was shocked. My previous experience had been with Slackware and Red Hat distros, and especially the older versions required a bit of technical know-how.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the default theme is quite pretty. I think so, anyway… At a glance, the top toolbar is reminiscent of Mac OS, while the bottom is similar to the the taskbar in Windows. The best of both worlds? The Chess game is open, as well as a neat app called Tomboy for taking and organizing notes.

Since I wanted to use my old Athlon as a file server on a Windows network, I had to set up Samba so that I could share folders. Setting up Samba was simple…the OS told me I didn’t have the required packages installed and asked if I wanted to install them. Click, click, done. No compiling or any funky Linux stuff. Not yet, anyway…

I tried to access the shared folder from my laptop running Windows XP SP2 but was not able to authenticate my username and password. Well, after some net-digging, I found this how-to “Setting Up Samba” on Ubuntu’s help site. The only relevant tidbit in this entire document turned out to be:

“Note: The default installation of Samba does not synchronize passwords. You may have to run “smbpasswd” for each user that needs to have access to his Ubuntu home directory from Microsoft Windows.”

Well, turns out Ubuntu is still Linux after all! I ran this command and then everything magically worked:

sudo  smbpasswd -a username

New SMB password:
Retype new SMB password:
Added user username.

To top it off, I played another round of Chess and, well, lost less badly. Actually, I was quite proud of the first half of the game.