I had to read this article twice to ensure I was actually reading it correctly. Then I visited the Broadcom website and downloaded it just to be certain this wasn’t a hoax. Yes, Broadcom, the most open only about not supporting Linux has released an open source Linux wireless driver. And it’s really under an open source license. The source files I opened were clearly GPLv2.

So Dell and Canonical forced them into it - but they did it. I’m honestly shocked.

Linux has hit a critical mass. It may not be taking over the desktop world, but it has at least reached “Mac” support status.

I found this a while back and it’s pretty old, but I just came across it again recently and had a good laugh. There’s an unofficial Ubuntu distribution called Ubuntu Christian Edition and this blog has a ton of hilarious[ly nerdy] “facts” about it, for example…

• In Ubuntu Christian Edition, all documents are saved by grace through faith
• With Ubuntu Christian Edition, you don’t need to surf the web — you can walk on it
• For 40 days before Easter, Ubuntu Christian Edition works in text mode only
• Ubuntu Christian Edition has the confess command that deletes your logs and caches

I began receiving this error in Ubuntu (after upgrading to Hardy 8.04 I think) whenever I tried to use the sox or play commands. Turns out the solution is pretty simple, sox had just lost its available format libraries.

sudo apt-get install libsox-fmt-all

I recently stumbled upon the Ubustu Feed when I began learning Ardour. They have a great tutorial on how to sync Hydrogen with Ardour:

This tutorial will show you how to sync up the digital audio workstation, Ardour, and the advanced drum machine, Hydrogen. This will allow you to have a full featured drum machine playing in perfect time with your Ardour session. Or, one hell of a fancy click track.

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Source: Unity Behind Diversity

Nice to see Bob Sutor has made the complete switch to Linux for laptop use at work. I remember the day I wiped out my Windows partition on my laptop - it was memorable. I then went an entire year booting Windows in VMWare only about 3-5 times.

It’s great to see the transition starting to happen everywhere. Even if some of the transitions are to Mac, it’s greater choice.

This was another interesting podcast. I’m obviously a fan of Mr. Vance (has anyone ever called him “Mr.”?) - maybe I’m the first. I also need to meet Matt Asay at some point… have much to discuss.

I’ve been eager to transition my music library from the proprietary patent-ridden MP3 format to Ogg Vorbis, and since my iPod died a few months back, I’ve decided to make the move. I’ve read up on Ogg Vorbis and learned that it’s best to re-rip my CDs, since converting from one compressed audio format to another is a bad idea.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) recently released software which it urged some of America’s largest universities to employ in order to monitor their networks for unauthorized file sharing. Not only do the universities not owe the MPAA anything, but the toolkit was found by security specialists to raise some major privacy concerns. Steve Worona, director of policy and networking programs at EDUCAUSE, says of the toolkit, “no university network administrator in their right mind would install this toolkit on their networks.”

Unfortunately, this is the second new HP laptop which has given me hardware problems in GNU/Linux over the past few months. However, this time the culprit is AMD/ATI and their restricted drivers. Thankfully, they’ve announced plans to open things up, but until that’s been handled, tutorials like this will be necessary to get a system up and running.

I found a tutorial which helped me get the xserver up and running in no time.

Last week, I decided to install VMware to run Linux (Ubuntu) and Vista on the computer at work. The process was quite simple, installed VMWARE Workstation, configure the Virtual Machines that I want to create, load it up and start installing. After everything installed, I put the VM images on to my USB harddisk and [...]

Managed to solve the problem with getting a blank screen while loading gdm after upgrading a desktop from 6.10 Edgy to 7.04 Fesity Fawn. The desktop has a ATI 9600 graphics card and works fine on 6.10 Edgy, however after the upgrade to 7.04, it starts having this problem. I knew it’s something wrong with [...]

System info of Toshiba Tecra S1:

BIOS: Version 2.50
system-version:PT831T-11Q4L
Ubuntu Version - Currently using Feisty 7.04, previously worked on 6.10 Edgy and 6.04 as well
Kernel - currently using 2.6.20-15-generic, had problem with 2.6.20-14 but 2.6.20-13 works

Hardware Components

Status

Notes

Pentium M 1.5GHz
Works
No special procedure

15″ XGA TFT Screen
Works
Default settings works

External VGA - 19″ Xerox XA7
Works
See this post for xorg settings

ATI [...]

Spent some time today trying to get Beryl to work on my Toshiba Tecra S1 running Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 beta with ATI Mobility 9000 graphics card. To start I used the following xorg.conf settings:
Section “Device”
Identifier “ATI 9000″
Driver “radeon”
Option [...]

After a discussion on a bug in the Xorg and ATI graphics card, I installed Google Earth to check that my graphics card is actually functioning correctly. My graphics card is the RADEON Mobility 9000 with the following Xorg.0.log:
(II) RADEON(0): [agp] GART texture map handle = 0xb0302000
(II) RADEON(0): [agp] GART Texture map mapped at 0xb51da000
(II) [...]

Before really getting into my final year project and revision for exams. I spent some time ugrading my 3+ years old laptop (Toshiba Tecra-S1) from Ubuntu 6.10 to 7.04 and optimising it. At the same time cleaned up my desk to have more space to work.

I have trying many different ways of optimising it with [...]