Thursday, January 31, 2008

Kernel upgrade to 2.6.22.16-0.1 and minor MadWifi inconvenience

The opensuse updater applet upgraded my kernel and the nvidia graphic card drivers on my opensuse 10.3. Everything was ok except Wifi stopped working.

I have a T61 with the Atheros chipset using MadWifi. It seems the MadWifi repositories haven't caught up. Luckily you can search for updated MadWifi rpms from software.opensuse.org/search.

So first things first is to check what my new kernel is ....

uname -r

Next I search for madwifi-kmp-default that matches the kernel I'm using on http://software.opensuse.org/search and I click on the "One click install" icon to install it.

Sunday, January 27, 2008

My sister's EEE-PC

Lucky my sister has small fingers. I can't imagine myself using this thing for work. The keys on the keyboard are so small and the screen though bright and clear is just too small. I guess that's the adjective that best describes this machine. It's small but it's just fine for my sister who happens to be just as petite ;-)

The unit is the PC-701 model equipped with a 1.3 megapixel webcam, 1GB memory and a 4 GB solid state hard disk with Xandros Linux pre-installed.

Three days before purchase I called to ask if there were available units. The sales person I spoke with said they had 75 units available but he added that these things were selling like hotcakes. When we finally dragged ourselves to the store, there were only 3 units left, he wasn't kidding !!!

I had a chance to play with it for about an hour and here are my first impressions.
  • Boot up is fast. No doubt, due to the solid state hard disk. It beat my T61 to the login screen.
  • The posters and flyers say its "Shock Proof - Weather Proof - Best in Class !". I'm inclined to agree, it feels solid and it's light. It feels like you can actually throw it around without worry.
  • It's linux of course, so the apps were all familiar linux apps like Pidgin, OpenOffice and Firefox, nothing any linux user hasn't seen.
  • Applications were quite responsive. Skype worked out of the box with the webcam.
  • There's a voice command app but I didn't get a chance to try it out yet.
Here are a couple of photos from my camera phone. The last two shots give you a feeling of how exactly small it is.


01242008264


01242008269


01242008270

01242008271

01242008272

Friday, January 25, 2008

ExtJS 2.0.1 is out

Everybody start your download managers and get ExtJS 2.0.1 from ExtJS.com

http://extjs.com/download

Looks like I'll be busy updating projects today ....

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Can I have your name sir ?

When I go order my favorite venti coffee jelly frapuccino from our local Starbucks, the barista always asks if I want a ham sandwich to go with it, I wonder why ?