Biker|Geek

I know this may seem insignificant to some but trust me it’s HUGE!!! I installed the ntfs-3g driver update this morning and I have tested it on my NTFS partitions and so far, it works flawlessly. What this means in plain terms is you can now write files and delete files to and from a Windows XP, WIn2K, or Windows Vista drive from Linux (with NTFS formatting). Fat32 has been supported for many years. No more booting into windows to erase a file. A word of caution however, make sure you do delete important system config files on your Windows partion/hard drive because essentially you will have broken your Windows install.

It looks like NTFS-3G has just hit 1.0. The release history page today said:
“Stable Version 1.0 (February 21, 2007) change: document and release version update to stable status”
Readers are reminded at this point that 1.0 (which in the Windows world often means “little better than beta”) has a very near magical meaning in Linux-land.

read more | digg story

I found this article orginally on John C. Devorak’s blog http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=9903. However, he is apparently not a Harley Davidson fan. As a result, I chose not to quote his remarks directly but rather those of the original article at http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/metro/20070219-9999-1n19harley.html

Note: This is used without permission.

By Anne Krueger
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

February 19, 2007

Jose Santana hadn’t ridden a motorcycle in years, but when the 67-year-old Jamul man died of a stroke last week, his four children wanted his funeral to reflect his free-wheeling side.

They agreed their father’s idea of heaven would be a final ride in a Harley-Davidson hearse.

CHARLIE NEUMAN / Union-Tribune
El Camino Memorial’s Doug Trobaugh drove a Harley-Davidson hearse carrying the casket of Jose Santana down Steele Canyon Road on Saturday. The mortuary began using the hearse last month.

“They said it was a Harley, and I said, ‘Yeah, he’d like that,’ ” son Jorge Santana said. “My dad liked his freedom.”

So Saturday at St. Pius X Catholic Church in Jamul, a black three-wheeled hog with shiny chrome fixtures pulled a glass coach with Santana’s casket inside. Driver Doug Trobaugh wore a black leather jacket embossed with “El Camino Memorial,” the mortuary where he works.

Santana’s funeral was the third time El Camino Memorial has put the $80,000 hearse in service since the Sorrento Mesa-based mortuary began using it in mid-January.

Two Harley hearses are in use west of the Mississippi, according to manufacturer Tombstone Hearse Co. of Alum Bank, Pa. The other is in Victorville.

The hearses are a hit with bikers, veterans, even little old ladies, said Tombstone owner Jack Feather, who came up with the idea of hitching a hog to a burial coach five years ago and has sold 18.

Veterans’ families like the coach’s glass sides “because then they can view the flag-draped casket. It reminds them of a military caisson,” Feather said.

And seniors? “They think it’d be a real hoot for their friends to see them,” he said.

Mike Miller, president of El Camino Memorial, said the Harley hearse is part of an effort to make funerals less somber and more celebratory. Miller said funeral directors want to offer creative ideas that focus on life, not death.

“We don’t want to be Herman Munster,” Miller said, referring to the character on the 1960s TV sitcom. “We’re about caring for people and giving them services about the life they’ve lived.”

For now, El Camino isn’t charging extra for the use of the Harley hearse. Miller said an additional charge may be added if demand increases. Three El Camino Memorial managers who ride Harley-Davidsons, including Trobaugh, talked Miller into buying the outfitted Road King.

Trobaugh, a member of San Diego HOG, a club for Harley lovers, said the group wants to use the hearse for charitable events in which they’ll load up the glass coach with blankets for the homeless or toys for orphans.

The hearse already has gotten lots of attention. In the first funeral, the young man who died was placed in a gold casket inside the coach. El Camino’s offices were flooded with calls from people who thought a celebrity had died.

“Our receptionist said we treat all their families like they’re a star,” Miller said.

This month, the family of Robert Montano, 31, of National City chose the Harley hearse for his funeral.

Carmen Montano said her brother, a construction worker, loved motorcycles but never could afford one. The Harley hearse was a way to give him the ride he never took in life.

“We were kind of worried if it looked foolish or disrespectful,” Carmen Montano said. “But it did look like something he would like. It was something different for him.”

The Harley hearse drew attention even as Miller showed it off in the parking lot outside his office. Bob Shelley of Poway, at the mortuary to make arrangements for his mother-in-law’s funeral, had to check it out.

“It looks like it’s just for the Hells Angels guys,” Shelley said. “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

Anne Krueger: (619) 593-4962; anne.krueger@uniontrib.com

Now this is a phone that is very interesting to me. Linux based so anyone can make apps for it and probably cheaper than a comparable Windows Smart Phone. Also, there’s some good info over at http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS8030785497.html

Trolltech’s Qtopia Greenphone is a Linux-based, quad band GSM/EDGE handset that boasts a QVGA touch screen display, 1.3-megapixel camera, 317MHz XScale processor, 128MB ROM, 64MB RAM, Bluetooth, and a miniSD card slot. Video preview after the jump.

Greenphone Specification

Software

* Qtopia Phone Edition 4.1.7
* Linux kernel 2.4.19

Hardware

* Touch-screen and keypad UI
* QVGA® LCD color screen
* Marvell® PXA270 312 MHz application processor
* 64MB RAM & 128MB Flash
* Mini-SDâ„¢ card slot
* Broadcom® BCM2121 GSM/GPRS baseband processor
* Tri-band (GSM 900/1800/1900) support
* Bluetooth® equipped
* Mini-USB port
* 1.3 megapixel camera

Development Environment

Minimum system requirements:

* 512 MB RAM
* 2.2 GB HDD space
* 1 GHz processor

CLICK FOR LARGER IMAGE

Some interesting data. Some of it not too surprising. This is Linux related obviously.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=530202

The polls are closed, the data has been audited and the results are in. Here are the official results for the 2006 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards:

Distribution of the Year – Ubuntu (26.44%)
Live Distribution of the Year – Knoppix (26.22%)
Browser of the Year – Firefox (74.61%)
Database of the Year – MySQL (61.68%)
Office Suite of the Year – OpenOffice.org (89.79%)
Desktop Environment of the Year – KDE (56.58%)
Video Media Player Application of the Year – mplayer (41.93%)
Video Authoring Application of the Year – Kino (27.81%)
Audio Media Player Application of the Year – amaroK (57.07%)
Audio Authoring Application of the Year – Audacity (67.07%)
Multimedia Utility of the Year – K3b (69.51%)
Messaging Application of the Year – Gaim (51.52%)
Window Manager of the Year – Fluxbox (21.44%)
IDE of the Year – Eclipse (34.47%)
Mail Client of the Year – Thunderbird (52.74%)
Text Editor of the Year – vi/vim (38.42%)
Graphics Application of the Year – GIMP (65.60%)
Security Application of the Year – nmap (20.94%)
Windows on Linux Application of the Year – Wine (50.10%)
Web Development Editor of the Year – Quanta (36.34%)
Shell of the Year – bash (89.45%)

A big congratulations to all the projects that were nominated this year. The number of quality projects out there is truly impressive. We once again had a record turnout, so a thank you is also in order for the LQ members who make initiatives like this such a success. For winners, a certificate and site badge will be available soon. As always, the full results will be available at http://www.linuxquestions.org/awards until the nominees for next year are announced.

I know this is one of my largest personal problems with Linux right now aside from configuring Samba using Ubuntu/Kubuntu.
As written over at: http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS4466236354.html

Analysis — When it comes to troublesome Linux peripherals, WiFi takes the cake. Sparked by the Portland Project’s efforts to bring standardization to the Linux desktop, the Linux wireless developer community tackled this problem at its second Linux Wireless Summit last month in London.

The Summit was scheduled as a followup to the January IEEE 802 standards committee meeting, which, among other issues, moved a step closer to making 802.11n a real IEEE standard. As a result of this timing, participants at the Linux WiFi meeting included kernel developers and vendor representatives from Intel, Broadcom, Devicescape, MontaVista, and Nokia.

Once there, according to Stephen Hemminger, Linux Wireless Summit co-coordinator and a Linux software developer at the Linux Foundation, the attendees had a very productive meeting.

Still, it’s been slow going in some critical areas of Linux and WiFi, according to John Linville, the Linux wireless software maintainer. In particular, Linville reported that development work is proceeding too slowly on a new 802.11 stack (d80211); and with a new WiFi API (cfg80211), “development is even slower.” Hemminger described the cfg80211 as “a good start but there are no user interface tools (the iproute2 equivalent of iwconfig).”

As for d80211, a breakout session addressed its technical issues. Hemminger wrote in his report on the summit that most of its problems “are not specific to the d80211 stack but have existed all along in Linux wireless. The problem is that up to now each device was doing its own different implementation. The d80211 stack currently exposes a ‘master’ interface which is only used for reconfiguring the internal queuing disciplines. Since the master interface shows up as a device, it can be a potential point of bugs or user confusion so there was discussion on ways to get rid of it prior to acceptance in the main kernel.”

There was also a discussion of the d80211 stack’s more advanced features that are seeing little use as of yet. In particular, Nokia was interested in QoS (Quality of Service) and WMM (WiFi Multimedia) support, because their existing device uses a proprietary userspace library.

As it is, “D80211 supports WMM based on the IP type of service (TOS) value in the socket API,” Hemminger added. This led to a discussion of whether or not existing glibc header files include the right values for WMM/TOS. It was noted that many existing multimedia applications, like Ekiga, Skype, and Google Talk, are not properly setting TOS.

Another breakout session dealt with regulatory concerns. This discussion led the group into facing the dilemma of proprietary hardware and firmware. According to Hemminger, “Hardware vendors license their equipment under FCC section 15 regulations, even though technically pure software devices could be under SDR (Software Defined Radio) regulations. FCC wants all devices to have a ‘no trespassing’ sign on radio settings but there is no consensus on what that means.”

As a result, “the only solution that can get certified in the current regulatory environment is to have a closed source component either in firmware (good), kernel (bad) or userspace (less evil),” Hemminger continued. The reverse-engineered drivers don’t have this problem, but the developers were concerned about the legal implications of redistributing them. “There is some concern since FCC has already stopped hackers who modify power levels on access points. Vendors are reluctant to address the SDR issues too directly because of the regulatory impact to existing non-Linux products if there was any problem.”

The reason why the FCC takes this position is that the governmental agency doesn’t want it to be easy for users to tamper with radio settings or power levels. Thus, the only WiFi solution that can be certified must have a closed source component. Thus, as distasteful as it is to some free software distributors, legal support for WiFi on Linux will often have to incorporate proprietary elements in one way or another.

Coming out of the meeting, the developers committed to make experimental wireless tarball (and driver) packages available; move faster on the new cfg80211 API; and gain a more complete understanding of the regulatory WiFi situation.

The next Linux Wireless Summit will be this fall, most likely in October, on either the U.S. East Coast or in Israel.

– Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols