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Friday WA time was when I was able to download the latest Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx), I then decided to perform an upgrade of my existing 9.10 (Karmic Koala) rather than a clean install – that was a big mistake.

Apart from taking over 3 hours to perform, once it was complete I found that my desktop effects wouldn’t work – Lucid had broken the ATI/fglrx graphics drivers, and it wasn’t possible to uninstall all components in order to re-install and fix the problem (major bug there). And on Ubuntu’s forums I wasn’t the only one having that problem. After a day of stuffing around, I had it fixed … sort of.

But it wasn’t good enough, so I bought a new WD 500 GB ‘black’ hard drive, replaced the 640 GB (Ubuntu 8.04 LTS) drive, and performed a clean install of 10.04 which it only took about half an hour – next was installing my usual applications and then migrating my data across to the new OS. Once done everything worked as it should, the new desktop ‘dark’ scheme looks great, and does it boot fast – from POST to a ready desktop in just 35 seconds, damn that is fast!

My new desktop 2560 x 1024 (spanning 2 x 19″ monitors @ 1280 x 1024 each)

more later …

Some may have heard of this, but I suspect many wouldn’t have, and I didn’t know about it until I found that I could login to my YouTube account with my Google ID.

Put simply, you register for an Open ID account , and then you can access sites like Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Live and many more with just the one username and password – much easier than having separate account access at each site.

You can get an Open ID from any provider listed here http://openid.net/get-an-openid , and with a central Open ID profile you can also link all your sites, as well as search friends/contacts from all your Social Networking sites and much more *.

As for security, I don’t think all the ‘big guns’ of the Internet would use it unless they knew it was a secure service; in fact many of them are sponsors of the Open ID Foundation, as well as having representatives on the Board of Directors; so it seems relatively secure in maintaining some of your personal information.

* the above is purely my summation of the Open ID service, please check with individual Open ID providers for exact usage,  features and benefits available.

Well, I’ve had the N97 a couple of weeks now, and I’m reasonably impressed with it. Getting use to a ‘Touch Screen’ phone/PC is a bit of a pain, but not so much that I’d replace it with an ordinary ‘keypad’ type phone.

Battery life is good considering the applications it can run and the screen graphics it supports; not as good as my previous Nokia 6233 for Standby Time, but far better than the Samsung Ultra Touch. I’m getting about 3 days Standby with reasonable phone use; even when using the GPS drive function, it consumes very little battery capacity, and that impresses me.

Although the text size is relatively small (even on maximum setting), it’s very handy having a ‘micro PC’ in my pocket; I can hit the Web, check emails, lookup phone numbers, get directions, do banking, check eBay and social networks etc etc

I’m eagerly awaiting the new Ubuntu release 10.04; I can then upgrade my recently installed 9.10 ‘Karmic Koala’ to an LTS* version which should see me through the next couple of years. I certainly like the new ‘darker’ theme that comes with it, far more appealing than the current & previous ‘brown’ theme.

But from all reports the following version 10.10 ‘Maverick Meerkat’ is going to be a ‘Windows’ breaker, and will be using the new Gnome 3 desktop environment which unfortunately wasn’t available in time for inclusion in 10.04 ‘Lucid Lynx’ (which uses the latest version of Gnome 2); and if 10.10 ‘Maverick’ is as ground breaking as it is intended to be, then I may upgrade to that when it’s released in October this year … I’ll wait n see on that though.

*LTS = Long Term Support – these releases use more stable versions of  applications, and are released every 2 years (in April) with support for 3 years on Desktop PCs, and 5 years on Servers. Other versions are released every 6 months (in April & October) with 18 months support, but use more ‘bleeding edge’ applications etc -  see here for more info.

Well after a further couple of weeks persevering with the Samsung after buying a new ‘aftermarket’ battery, I phoned 3 (Three – Vodafone Hutchison Australia) and informed them the 700 ma battery time was better than the factory 880ma battery, but only just and I still couldn’t get more than a day and a half from it on Standby, and only with minimal use.

In the intervening weeks since my last contact with 3, the new Nokia N97 mini had been released and 3 could let me have it ‘free’ on the $49/mth cap plan; all I had to do was send the Samsung back and all cancellation fees would be waived – ok, give me the N97 and I’ll see how things go from there.

The N97 is definitely a better phone in so many ways, but mainly in ‘Standby’ battery life; I’m getting 3 days + with average use. (continue reading…)

Well, the USB mobile broadband dongle from ‘3′ finally arrived. I ordered this online on 21st Dec, admittedly not the best time to expect prompt deliveries, but I ordered other items from Hong Kong & UK over the same period which were delivered quicker than something from within Australia – why is that?

A 2003 IBM r40e is not a high-end laptop, but it is reliable, and will handle just about anything you need in the way of mobile computing. This unit was relatively cheap in 2003 when I bought it, only AUD$1,400.00. I bought a few extras for it over time to extend it’s capabilities such as a Minitar 802.1b wireless PCMCIA card, and a 3 port USB 2.0 PCMCIA card.

Last year I was finally able to rid the ‘craptop’ of it’s default Windows XP Home OS, replacing it with Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope. After trying many Linux variations over the years, Jaunty was the first to actually run everything, and after installing ndiswrapper to contain the ‘windows’ wireless drivers for the Mintar card, wireless connections to my home network are faultless with networking available as soon as the desktop has loaded. I also recently tried 9.10 Karmic Koala, but graphics support seemed broken for the IBM, so I re-installed Jaunty (note: Karmic works great on my desktop PC).

After seeing a friends Toshiba laptop connect to the internet using a Virgin brand USB Broadband dongle running from a live Jaunty CD, I knew Ubuntu had got their wireless support RIGHT. (continue reading…)

I’d been thinking of upgrading the system graphics card to better cope with dual monitors, there was just to much lag and a few other little annoyances with the existing ASUS EAH3450 card – it would probably be ok running just one monitor, but  running 2 seemed to be stretching it’s capabilities.

So, after the debarcle with upgrading the system memory, or rather not upgrading it, I ended up with a credit note at my local PC shop. Rather than just leave the credit note just sitting there doing nothing, I decided to cash it in with an additional $90 and grabbed a new Sapphire HD5770 card.

Well the card is great, but unfortunately the new ATI drivers didn’t get along with Hardy 8.04 LTS – the ATI Catalyst Control Center simply wouldn’t open, and as such I couldn’t make any adjustments, nor set the dual monitors to run as one big desktop. (continue reading…)

Unbelievable; after waiting 2 weeks for replacement memory Kingston KHX8500D2T1K2/4G to come in, I drive about 20 kms to the PC shop to pick it up. After finishing business ops for the day, I shut down the PC, remove my existing RAM from slots 1 & 2 and drop in the 2 new modules in slots 3 & 4. When it boots up, the memory shows as 800MHz and BIOS displays ‘running in safe mode’ message … what the!

So I shut it down, and swap the memory into slots1 & 2, reboot and it’s still running at 800MHz, despite BIOS being set to run at 1066MHz. OK, so I shut it down and reseat both modules, then reboot … but this time there’s no POST, so nothing on screen at all – arrgghh

Out with the new RAM, in with existing (same make/model/type) and reboot – everything runs fine, and at 1066MHz; and to make sure I run Memtest for one full pass of all 8 tests without a problem.

New RAM has been returned to PC shop, and am now awaiting another replacement 2 x 2GB kit – and when it gets here it better work !

Dual-core to Quad-core
At the end of September, I decided it was time to upgrade the PC’s CPU from the Athlon X2 5600+ (2.8 GHz) I built it with, to one of the new Phenom quad-cores now that prices had come down. I was bit concerned as to whether the mainboard would support it due to the Thermal Designof  the new CPU’s being in the 125 watt range, so I emailed Gigabyte Technical supoort, who replied that it did indeed support the Phenom CPUs.

After checking around for Phenom prices, my local PC supplier informed me that AMD was releasing a new 3.0 GHz X4 945 CPU with a TD of 95 watts. Even though it wasn’t a ‘Black Edition’ with the unlocked multiplier, I felt this was a better choice as this CPU would run cooler than a 125 wattt unit, so I ordered it in and picked it up on 2nd October.

After installing it, (continue reading…)

Eagerly awaited, cause it’s looking so good in the beta version – and if it is as good as it promises to be, then I’ll update my OS to the 64 bit version from my 32 bit version of 8.04