Thursday, April 2, 2020

how to recover a ck77 3.3V camera module from a scrap PC

Got a ck77 94v-0 3.3V (model 5SF001N2F) camera module out of a scrap ASUS K550V. It shows a Realtek RTS5806 chip on board.



ck77 94v-0 3.3V (model 5SF001N2F)
ck77 94v-0 3.3V (model 5SF001N2F)


There are plenty of instructables posts and videos out there teaching how to recover webcams out of scrap PC.
Unfortunately none of them covers the webcam module I have got so I had to find myself the pinout needed to successfully connect it to a USB port.

Here are my findings:

Friday, December 7, 2018

Get rid of that f..ng "permission denied" error when using -acpitable file=/.. option in libvirt XML guest definition file.

ABSTRACT:

This post relates to how to activate an OEM windows10 when it runs as a kvm guest controlled by libvirt, getting rid of that f..ng "permission denied" you
get using the qemu:arg ... -acpitable command line option within the libvirt XML guest definition file.

WHAT TO DO IF YOU ARE IN HURRY:

Grab your product key out of MSDM ACPI table.
Place your SLIC.bin file in /usr/share/seabios directory and have the XML line to point at it.
<qemu:arg value='-acpitable'/>
<qemu:arg value='file=/usr/share/seabios/SLIC.bin'/>


Run your guest, go to Windows and activate it using the product key you grabbed from MSDM.
Done.

DETAILS:

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

TAB key autocomplete not working in xfce4 (no file completion)


First I noticed that bash autocomplete (also known as "shell file completion") stopped working. Pressing TAB I only see the cursor to flash a little and got no filename or command expansion.

All relevant lines in .bashrc were in place and correct.

Then I noticed the TAB key was not working in any application (e.g. text editors, mail, ....): TAB was doing nothing. So it is obvious that autocomplete couldn't work as well.
So I assumed that by pressing the TAB the applications receive a wrong code. As a counter-proof I've found that directly typing the TAB code (Ctrl-I) solves the problem. Remote ssh sessions worked fine.
Started to suspect an xfce4 wrong setting...

I've found the following solution:

Monday, December 28, 2015

How to test the TDK TBD420NR CCFL inverter

TDK TBD420NR inverter with some signal paths highlighted.
TDK TBD420NR inverter with some signal paths highlighted.

The TDK TBD420NR CCFL inverter is found in many laptop screens. I've found it in an HP Pavillon DV9500.

LCD screens with CCFL backlight are prone to failures and  you are often in doubt if it is an inverter or CCFL lamps failure.
So it is very useful to have a way to live check the inverter before ordering a new one just to discover that the failure is elsewhere.
I've found a way to live check the TDK TBD420NR.

Sunday, December 14, 2014

Installing an HP OEM Windows 2012 R2 Essential server as KVM Guest


I have an HP Proliant DL385p Gen8 box together with a HP/OEM installation disk of Windows Server 2012 R2 Essential.
On the iron I've installed Ubuntu Server 12.04.5 64bit plus xfce 4.1 (horrible: avoid it!) and KVM latest version available in ubuntu repository at the time of this writing (Dec2014).
The windows server is going to run as a guest over KVM. I have plenty of configurations like this perfectly working where, however, the Windows software is not OEM..
Here, a little while after the windows server installation CD boots up in the guest, it stops with the following message:"This system is not a supported platform": the hardware platform must be an HP and the actual one is not. No way.