Category Archives: Fun

Dell XPS Vanity Lights

I have a Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop. Long name for a big laptop.

It has some “vanity lights” on the lid, in the vents and speaker grilles. They are controllable via options in the BIOS and with a Windows based application. When I bought it the first thing I did was install Linux so I have never had the chance to play with controlling the lights from within the OS, only at boot-time from the BIOS.

Until now!

After reading about babeldisk the “safe” Linux distro, I thought I would have a play. Being a tightwad and happy with Ubuntu I decided not to sign up and buy a copy, but download the ISO image and have a look and see what it had on it.

I booted up the ISO using the magic that is qemu and kqemu (kernel accelerator).

$ qemu -cdrom Desktop/babeldisc_20070410.iso -m 512 -net nic -net user -boot d

The initial boot menu has an option for the “babel booster” which is a device you can buy from them which looks like it caches your data locally. I don’t have one so I booted using the second option – without the babel booster.

We have just had quite a warm weekend here in the UK. As temperatures rise, often so does the likelyhood of computer failure. In my experience this happens more in the home or small office where air conditioning isn’t quite so prevalent (in the UK).

One component that doesn’t like high tempreatures is the hard disk. Enter hddtemp, a great little package to tell you how hot your disks are. It’s been around a while, but many people don’t know about it. I found myself installing it on everything and pasting in IRC, then a few others starting doing the same.

It can be run on the command line to get the current temperature, or can be used as a daemon which can provide information to other clients such as gkrellm.

alan@wopr:~$ sudo hddtemp /dev/sd[ab]
Password:
/dev/sda: Maxtor 6V250F0                          : 43°C
/dev/sdb: Maxtor 6V250F0                          : 43°C