19 October 2007

Installing openSUSE 10.3, take 2

Yesterday, I installed (not upgraded) openSUSE 10.3 on my workstation. It is a bit iffy – it’s a cheapo motherboard, with onboard and add-on SATA, and always confuses the OS in terms of what disk comes in what order… Add to that a PCI GigE card that always forgets its MAC address (00:00:00:…), it’s not easy… I installed to the SATA disk, and the installation went really smoothly, until the reboot, when it booted back into the old GRUB install on the IDE drive. OK, figured that one out (modify the device.map, have it chainload the SATA drive from Grub, if the BIOS can’t figure it out).

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9 October 2007

Cingular/AT&T N75, firmware, and A2DP

I’ve had the Nokia N75 since July, and bought a Motorola HT 820 bluetooth headset as well. Sound was crappy, though, and the audio controls did not work: indication that the A2DP profile wasn’t working, but you never know – it could be a Motorola-Nokia incompatibility. Well, I found a clear explanation on how to upgrade the firmware on the N75 (essentially, ask AT&T for an unlock code, then follow the instructions here). And lo and behold – it worked just fine, in nice stereo, and not too bad, either. I now have bluetooth stereo on my cell phone. Now if I could only find a second battery, I would be happy… (Note: the bluetooth radio in at least one of my devices is fairly weak – with the phone in my leg pocket, calf height, and the headset on my head, sound can come and go. With the phone in my jacket pocket, everything works well.)

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9 July 2007

After my Motorola died, I get a new phone, and decided to try out a quasi-smart phone: Nokia N75. Coolest thing: hooking up a bluetooth keyboard to the phone… (You need to install an application for that to work, which can be found here). All my email accounts are already set up (IMAP and POP). Now I just need to find out how to get it to do OTA SyncML to the Oracle Calendar server at Cornell, and I’m all set. (This might mean the end of day-to-day  usage of my Palm… but the bigger screen is still an asset…)

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17 May 2007

Nexenta in VMware

Nexenta is a GNU-based OpenSolaris – very cool. I ran it using the latest VMware image from their site. Trouble is, the latest (VMware 6.0) vmware-tools did not install cleanly. I found that it assumes a pure Solaris structure. Here’s the patch to vmware-config-tools.pls for it to work with Nexenta:

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