Q and A

This is the almighty Q and A section. If you want to ask a question about this device you can do so by sending me an email. I will try to answer questions to the best of my knowledge.

Q: Why waste days hacking this?
A: BECAUSE IT'S THERE! I'm saving the hardware from the evils of MSN... well, Actually it's a great learning experience. I'm taking something that's designed to do "X" and making it do something that I want it to do. This is quite complex and most people don't have the patience/lack of sanity that I do.

Q: Why don't you take the money and do something else with it?

A: First off, I didn't pay the $350.00 retail that follows this device, I found one at First Saturday for $20.00 If i can't get it working, oh well at least it comes with a power supply and a pretty decent 3 button scrolling USB mouse.

Q: What are the legalities involved in hacking this device?

A: uhh... I don't know. I am not a lawyer but I'm sure that this falls under "Fair Use"
Q: Why won't my Emachines device boot from (usb-zip,usb-fdd,usb-hdd,etc..)?

A: If you checked the BIOS settings and it is set to "USB-ZIP,C" or whatever pertains to your device. I have not tried the USB-FDD option and after blowing almost $50 in various HDD sleds, I'd just as soon give up on that.. The last thing to check is to make sure that the jumper described at the bottom of the page on 2. Hardware Overview has been shorted.

Q: I tried Jailbait but it doesn't work! Why is this?

A: The Jailbait distro was designed around and built for the Compaq IA-1 an Emachines predecessor. This unit was easy to hack because it had a CompactFlash slot built in. This CF slot was wired as Primary Slave and as such the jailbait distro was designed to expect to be mouted from this device (/dev/hdbX). I am working on re-engineering the Jailbait distro so that it will work from the internal SanDisk. Keep looking to the website on details when I finish it.

Q: What the hell is Jailbait? are you some kind of pervert?

A:Umm. No. Jailbait is called Jailbait because it's image size is 15MB. (which ISJailbait.... (this is only speculation. )

Q: Where can I get more info about this device?

A: Take a look at http://www.linux-hacker.com I post my findings there under the name "FIRESTORM_v1". This is a great place to go to learn new ideas on what to do with these devices.