Linux

According to ABI Research, Linux will be the fastest growing smart phone operating system over the next five years, and will grab about one third of market share by then.

Will RIM change their proprietary operating system to Linux? Not now, but eventually they will have to.

The Nokia N810 is due to come out on October 23 (next Tuesday). It runs a variant of Linux Debian. It was even made to work in Arabic by M Sameer.

A Toronto company put out a job on Monster.com for Flash developers. The candidate should know Lynux though. What exactly is that?

If everyone pronounced Linux the way Linus does (Lee-nooks), rather than the Anglicized (Lie-nooks) this would not have happened.

Two wireless providers in Canada started offering laptop access via PC cards.

Bell Canada has introduced laptop cards that provide internet connectivity anywhere in coverage areas. The ads tout the fact that they can be used in a cab or on a train.

These cards use the mobile phone frequencies and data infrastructure (EVDO).

The monthly unlimited plan is $75 which is reasonable.

Since late November 2006, I had Ubuntu Edgy 6.10 running on my Toshiba Satellite A100-TA6. I wrote a full report on that here.

So, I decided to take the plunge and upgrade to Feisty 7.04, and so the adventure begins.

Intel High Definition Audio (HDA) Sound Problems

My laptop has an Intel HDA sound card.

ubuntu.com has switched to Drupal.Very nice and visually appealing design.This is also on digg, although Drupal is not mentioned, and I posted it on Drupal.org's forum. My favorite Linux distro is using my favorite CMS.

Earlier, I wrote about how to use a USB 2.0 hard disk drive enclosure for backup.

In this article, I explain how to use that hard disk using the dump utility.

The dump utility

The dump utility is one of the oldest commands for backup on UNIX system, but not one that is widely used in home and small business Linux systems.

Finally, after buying and returning two HP laptops, including the HP DV6120, I settled on one that works with Linux. It is the Toshiba Satellite A100 TA6. The product ID is PSAA8C-TA602C.

The hardware configuration is as follows:

• Intel Centrino Duo T2250 Processor 1.73GHz Processor Speed
• 15.4" Wide XGA TFT with Trubrite Display
• 120GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)
• 1GB DDR2 memory
• Intel 950 GMA graphics adapter (128 MB shared memory)
• Intel 3945ABG wireless LAN adapter
• Realtek 861 audio on Intel High Definition Audio (HDA)
• DVD Super-Multi Drive +/- Double Layer
• 10/100 Integrated Ethernet LAN on the back, left side
• 4 USB ports (two on the right side, and two on the back right)
• Modem RJ11 port (right hand side)
• External Microphone Port, Headphone Port
• S-Video Out (left side)
• Monitor connection (left side)
• Firewire (left side)
• 2 PCMCIA slots (one Cardbus Type II, and one Expresscard)
• xD/SD/MM/Memory stick card reader (does not work in Linux)
• 2.8 kg

The laptop cost $1100 at Staples, with $170 for 3 year extended warranty. They matched the price from Best Buy 10 days after I bought it, and that made it $1040.

I finally bought myself a new laptop. It is an HP DV6120 CA. In this article I describe how I setup Linux on it, what works, what needed workarounds, and what doesn't work. If you have helps or hints or tips, please add them as a comment to the article.

For years, I have been using an IDE Travan tape for backup. I detailed the advantages of removable media like tape and how to use it under Linux in another article.

However, the choice of tape drives and tape cartridges for a home office environemnt are rather limited. The media is expensive, and the drives are also expensive.

My Seagate IDE Travan drive is capable of backing up 10GB, and 20GB with compression. This was satisfactory for years, until I got a 4 megapixel camera, and disk usage started to go up. I had to split the backup into two tapes, one for the pictures directory, and another for everything else.