Gojira94

GM calibrations in the 727 & 747 ECMs from 87-94 do exactly that, as well as the 16188051 that ran the V8 F-bodies in 94-95. The GM TBI applications on the 727 and 747 had you disconnect the ESC (electronic spark control) module to prevent the ECM from advancing timing at warm idle so you could set the distributor at exactly 0* with a timing light for the ECM to have a valid starting point with room for retard and advance across the arc of the rotor tip. My 94 Formula has the ability to do an immediate 16* of burst knock retard… and bring it back in over about 4 seconds’ recovery time. I think I’m at the point of reaching out to NickInTime and seeing how far he got, taking a crack at dumping the remaining raw hexadecimal data and seeing what can be teased out into the realm of the known.

Is the point of lining up the trailing edge of the rotor tip to the plug wire contact... to give the ECU plenty of rotor tip to work with, for almost any degree of electronic spark advance, not exceeding the rotor tip's radius/ degrees of arc, tangent to the wire contact in the cap? i.e. if that position in tip 13 represents 0* electronic spark advance, what happens if the ECU commands, say, retard -4* due to knock? If we knew the max advance and retard programmed into the ECU's calibration parameters, could the distributor be indexed even more perfectly, like really close to the end of the rotor tip with maybe 6-8* to spare for retard?

Ok, no problem. Open the shell (the Linux command line thing) type lsusb and tell us what that says (there'll be a lot, maybe take a pic or two of the output) type nmtui and let us know if it opens a networking config utility or says something like 'command not found.' Look around in the point-and-click menus and try to find something akin to "settings" with a sub-menu for network stuff. Take a pic if you find it and post it. If anything says "you must be root to do this" in the shell, type su and enter the password for the account root (the built-in Local Administrator account) and repeat the command/ proceed onward.

Linux likely sees the wifi dongle but hasn't done anything with it, or has put it in its list of network devices already, and you just have to find it. Run lsusb in a shell (first letter is a lowercase L). This will enumerate all the USB devices attached to the system, by what it sees at the base firmware level. If it's in the list of USB devices, do nmcli dev status in the shell to see if Linux has added it to networking devices. Xfce may have the GUI version of network manager installed by default. From the shell, try nmtui and you may see a rudimentary GUI you can use to enable/ configure the USB wifi. Xfce may also have a settings widget somewhere in its desktop environment that includes configuring network devices, display settings and more, kind of like Gnome and KDE, and many other window managers. For everyday use on the internet, you'll want all devices to have IP addresses assigned by DHCP, DNS server assignment set to auto, or bound to what the DHCP server assigned for DNS. DNS is what resolves website domain names to IP addresses on the internet.

I'm in the same boat, though I'm not on the road yet. My engine harness has a single ground loop at the left fender well but no fan control relay, fan motor or radiator temperature switch (C243, C244, C245) wiring in it or a diode assembly for A/C turn-on of the fan signal. The 88 electrical manual (p.40) says the ground point for the "heavy duty cooling-4L (option)" is at G106. Maybe that's the additional ground loop shown in the harness diagrams with the additional cooling option. I'd swear I read something before that showed the ground point numbers/ locations but I can't find it at the moment to confirm. I picked up a temperature switch (Std Motor Products TS258/ Duralast SW594) to go with a late HO radiator that has the cooling fan switch threaded boss in it. The later electric fans with more blades will have a different connector than the early ones for Renix, but that probably won't matter for building your own setup based on the electrical manual diagram. Just need a 190* temp switch either in the radiator or HO t-stat housing to make the signal, a 40A relay, fan assembly, power & ground. From what I'm reading, there is no signal to/ from ECU in this arrangement for '88.

I was reading the Renix Fuel Injection Manual yesterday and under injectors (p.57) it says the resistance at 20*C (68*F) resistance should be 16 ohms. That's a bit higher than I would have expected. Is there ANYONE out there who has a couple of these off-car or even still running some that would be willing to ohm a couple out?

Engine pics? I love the LTx platform, have tuned a bunch of Opti cars. Congrats on the great find!

I have the no-idler A/C & mech fan bracket + W/P pulley from a 98 XJ, intake & PS setup from a 99 XJ with the (US made) Ebay relo kit, using an HO alternator: My belt size came to 74". My only concern with this setup is how well the belt will engage the mech fan pulley. An A/C compressor, with its much larger diameter pulley probably gives an additional 20* of engagement against the mech fan pulley than the smaller alternator pulley. I'll find out if that's an issue when I finally get my rig running. The HO alternator does require installing an external regulator, not too difficult. The guy who makes the REM has a video on the job using an 89 XJ to demonstrate:

Windows: C:\Users\<your_username>\Pictures Linux: /home/<your_username>/ (depending on Linux distro, may have a 'pictures' dir, you may have to make one) Linux built in wallpapers is usually /usr/share/wallpapers. 'usr' is Unix System Root, and though it makes your brain think "user" that's not the case. Things in the /usr folder are usually restricted to being modified by the user 'root' or another user or group of local users that can act as root with sudo, or by giving them write permissions to the folder on that directory (not advisable). A normal user has full permissions to make whatever files and directories it wants in its own home dir ( /home/<your_username> ) If you want to know the path of where you are at any time, type pwd in the shell. / is the equivalent to C:\ (the topmost directory on the filesystem containing the OS). /usr would be like C:\Windows. To make a new directory, just like in Windows you'll use mkdir, i.e. mkdir /home/<your_username>/pictures or if you're already in /home/<your_username> (the default when you open a shell as a normal user) you can just do mkdir pictures. Avoid the temptation to use a leading capital letter for files and directories. Linux is case-sensitive and Pictures is not the same as pictures. Windows is not case-sensitive so you can't have both on the same path. And having to type that leading capital letter become tedious quickly.

I've been AFK since Friday, just seeing the updates now. Very happy you got into it and got the disk sorted out. I was always fond of KDE (KDesktopEnvironment) but getting it installed on most major distros that have left it out of their source repos these days make it more trouble than it's worth. I'm not fond of Gnome but I got used to it on my RHEL laptop. For older systems, finding the distro that works well on the hardware with minimal overhead, with decent performance, with a desktop system you can tolerate is the formula for ultimate success. Sometimes it takes a while to find the one you like. Changing wallpapers in graphical mode can be done by downloading or copying in wallpaper images you like and switching to them in the settings.

If you're in the emergency console/ shell, GRUB has already loaded the OS bootstrap, you unfortunately didn't interrupt it. Sudo won't get you anywhere- it's a preamble to any command you want to run as root, or literally, the 'super user.' Means 'do' the following command as the 'super user.' Here's an example: sudo systemctl daemon-reload. if you want to change to 'being' that root user itself, the command is su, and you'll be prompted for root's credentials. I mentioned LiLO, because it was the de facto bootloader before GRUB was a thing, back in the Linux kernel 2.x days. It's not a command unto itself. What Big_Mark and I are asking about F8 or Esc are keys that can be struck after the power on self-test ("POST") that the BIOS performs, but BEFORE the BIOS hands off control to whatever OS bootstrap resides on the first track of the hard drive. Special keys programmed into the BIOS allow you to do different things. These key assignments vary by the manufacturer of the BIOS (Award, AMI, some OE like IBM, HP, ASUS write their own or customize an Award or AMI .bin file). Things like stop and specify a boot device manually, boot straight from network, modify settings for an embedded device like a RAID controller, enter the BIOS itself to change settings (which you're able to), etc. The critical keystroke here is the one that will let you select the boot device from a list. In your case, something other than the HDD. Big_Mark and I believe either F8 or Esc will halt the BIOS from handing off to GRUB and let you select USB disk or optical drive (which may require a keystroke of its own to launch a menu- remember "Press any key to boot from CD" in the XP/Vista/Win7 days). If you have an old Vista/Win7 CD you can boot from that and use the command prompt from its menu to do fdisk /mbr (which will remove GRUB). Then do: diskpart select disk 0 clean and your hard drive will be effectively blank from track 0 out to the last sector. One last suggestion, since you can get into the BIOS. Look for a setting like "enable option keys" so keys you can hit to halt the BIOS and do other things are available. Otherwise, there may not be any ability to use "F8" or "Esc" to enter a boot selection menu.

By the way, the default timeout for grub, before it loads and displays its business, is 0 seconds. What we used to do with systems at Red Hat was edit /etc/default/grub and change line 1 from GRUB_TIMEOUT=0 to 2. If you can interrupt GRUB, which is difficult unless you start hammering a BIOS option key before it starts, you can get to the emergency console by hitting literally any other key than Enter. From there, you can press e and add rd.break to the end of the line that ends with the word linux, hit Ctrl-x and get the emergency console shell. After that you have to remount the file system read-write, vi or vim /etc/fstab and start looking for improperly mounted filesystem entries or missing devices, fix or delete entries. If your Linux install was working at one time, I'd walk you through this stuff. Since your problem isn't specifically inside Linux, I'm suggesting ways to get around/ behind GRUB and kill it.

I'm running Win7 32-bit on a laptop (IBM T42 - 1.8GHz CPU) from 2005 with 2GB RAM and an IDE (parallel ATA disk with a decent 8MB I/O buffer). It's ungodly slow with anything other than my tuning software for GM LT1 & TBI stuff. It's the disk I/O read/write rate that will make Win10 miserable for you. The only part of a legacy BIOS an OS can possibly write to is the boot block where the handoff from BIOS to OS occurs when it looks to mount hard disk track 0 and let OS take over. Really old computers had a BIOS setting (or jumper) to clear the boot block, as boot block viruses could write themselves there and prevent OS boot. LiLO theoretically could, and GRUB can and does write to newer UEFI-based systems' firmware to make boot entries, as do MS OS Win8 and higher. Being that you have a legacy BIOS (pre-UEFI) system, the boot block is the only possibility I can offer you to check/ clear inside the BIOS, if possible. I'd offer you a free 2.5" IDE drive but the only ones I have left are 12-20GB with 512k buffers and would be all but unusable in anything made after 1997. One last thought - see if hammering Esc or F8 get you into the boot menu so you can manually select/force the boot device (reference here: https://www.disk-image.com/faq-bootmenu.htm).

Y'all are welcome to stop by sometime, I'd love to see what a running MJ looks like up close lol! And I'd be extra thrilled if you took my old front axle with you

The Asus A3000-A3A/A3C models look to be more like 2005, not 1995. Something like that would have full boot from optical drive and USB HDD, where a laptop from 10 years earlier may not have. Circa 1995, OS installation usually began from a boot diskette, which loaded DOS-level IDE optical drive drivers to install Windows 95 or 98 from CD. Hence the guesswork about booting from a diskette drive. All that being said, I'll assume you installed Mint from a bootable USB stick or CD or DVD you burned from a downloaded ISO file. Either whatever media you're trying to boot from now isn't bootable and it's trying the next device(s) in the boot order until it boots from the IDE HDD, which contains the GRUB bootloader, or the optical drive has failed, or it only supports CD, CD-R and it's being fed DVD or CD-RW and the drive doesn't support DVD, and many drives have trouble with CD-RW that's been burned as bootable. Making USB media bootable isn't as straightforward as you might think. I use a tool called Rufus (https://rufus.ie/en/)for this. If you have a CD/DVD burner on another computer you can still make bootable optical disks from standalone bootable ISO images like Ultimate Boot CD (https://www.ultimatebootcd.com/). Last- you won't be able to install Windows 10 on that. Windows 7 or 8.1 (32-bit only) at the highest. I believe that machine has a max of 2GB memory. It would work very well with XP, for an offline use only machine for tuning/ datalogging, for example. Or if you prefer Linux, an old copy of Red Hat 8.0/9.0 "Psyche" or "Shrike" codename distributions (Pre- Fedora era).

Ok last stupid post from me- no diskette drive in that thing? Late era socket 7 Pentium 1 on an Intel 82837EX/HX/LX chipset laptops almost always had one. With USB support in the last of the Intel P1 chipsets, you could possibly boot from a USB diskette drive/Win98 boot (DOS) diskette and run fdisk /mbr, if the diskette drive is borked.

Oops, I thought you had a broken dual boot scenario. If your initial boot screen on power-on has a full screen logo for ASUS, you can hit esc or tab and it will show the POST info (RAM count, CPU ID, disk enumeration, etc. and should show a message that says something like "Press F1" or "Press Del" to enter setup. Once into the BIOS (entirely independent of what's on track 0 of any disk attached) you can find the boot order and set optical drive as first boot device, follow whatever key prompt to enter CD/DVD boot.

What OS in on the Windows partition? XP and older you can boot to a DOS boot disk and run fdisk /mbr to re-create the master boot record.

I'm 1/8 Cherokee, 1/8 African (mom's side), but the 75% western European remainder pretty much makes the 25% invisible. I like cars from all manufacturers and all people from the One manufacturer. So I got this to go on my front plate bracket as an acknowledgement of the people whose name the MJ bears.

My wife spotted member onlyinajeep726 last Tuesday in Clayton, NC. Sent me this pic:

I stand corrected. Thanks for the clarification.

Dorman uses the same part #s for the 3/1 and 3/2 that General does (General is likely their source). 97-555 for the regular and 97-571 for the HD spring. Looks like even Dorman is out of the HD springs on Amazon, but it appears JC Whitney's Ebay store has stock: 97-571_JCWhitney_Ebay

My rig doesn't have A/C so it has the small ball. The glued seam definitely leaks now after 36 years. Dithering a bit on exactly what to use to seal it.

I have no real quarrel with nicopp but prefer the coated lines without any copper content. Not quite as easy for small radius bends by hand but I get by bending it against a socket of appropriate size to avoid kinks. All by hand, no tubing benders. I used about 32' to completely re-create all brake plumbing on my project. AutoZone has the 25' rolls for $28.00 USD.

AGS Poly Armor 3/16" line comes in 25' and larger bulk sizes and stainless gravel guard wire to go around it is ubiquitous. Any decent shop should know how to make a pair of 3 foot brake lines. Ours are 3/8" fittings at both ends/ both sides. I made mine from said bits in about 20 minutes using the old ones as guides for the bends, did them by hand and double flared them with a good handheld flaring tool.