MSN TV2 Readies for Launch, Linux Hackers Ready to "Revise it"

Microsoft is nearing a launch of their MSN TV product version 2. It features a 733Mhz Celeron processor and 128Meg's of RAM and is broadband enabled. This appears to be Microsoft's push to get a product out there ready for broadband media services for your TV. It also is a tempting target for Linux pro's to turn the device into a cheap media server or our very own "Linux TV"

You can read more about it here.

Taking it to the next level

Linux has roughly one more year until Longhorn comes out in 2006. We will see a beta sometime in 2005 I'm sure. With support from IBM/HP/Novell and others we should begin to see better improvements in Linux shortly. The next version of Suse Linux should be in the works by now though nobody has heard anything about it yet. Strange becuase by now you usually hear something a few months after each release about the next release. It's possible that they're extending release cycles out a little bit but I dont see it being a big problem if they did two releases a year as long as software is kept up to date with bugfixes. Much like OSX releases go.

Another thing I'd like to see is some sort of enforced standard. LSB would be a start if everyone would stick with it. Also some sort of standard package management that works cross platform as much as possible would also be good. Portage comes to mind but I'm sure everyone does not want to compile their own packages everytime they install something. Imagine compiling OoO!

The driver situation needs to be resolved fairly soon also. Nvidia has done a great job making it easy to install. ATI has a lot of catching up to do in this arena. We could probably use a lobbying group to press hardware makers to release specs so drivers can be built or for them to release their own drivers. Broadcom and their dominance in the 54g chipset market and refusal to release Linux drivers on vuage excuses has probably caused me the most irritation. We should be working to have drivers install just as easily as in Windows. This is another problem related to package management.

I've got more things I'd like to see but I'll save them for another day.

Software Suspend In a Unlikely Place

I've been working to get Linux working 100% on my laptop for ages. It's HP Ze4430us which is only about year old. Even with 2.6.x I was unable to get software suspend (Saving machine state to disk) which many Linux laptop users bemoan the lack of and are forced to wait through long boot times for many distros.

We'll I loaded my Distro of choice (Linspire) onto the laptop. I did not expect the desktop edition (Linspire has a Laptop Edition) to have any special laptop features already loaded. We'll it did and when the battery meter loaded up I saw a option to suspend. Since it was a fresh install and I was not really worried of screwing up anything I told it to suspend. We'll it did. And better yet it completely booted back up when I hit the power button. Mouse was a little confused but after turning it on and off with the button on the keyboard it worked fine.. so it's not really a big issue. They pulled this off on a 2.4.24 kernel which is also a big surprise.

So I can honestly say everything I want working on my laptop is working great. I'm still having a 54g issue and my trusted Linuxant drivers are not behaving but I'm confident I will have that issue fixed sometime today when I get time to see why it's not working.

Happy 13th Birthday Linux

August 25th is Linux's 13th birthday. Bad number but it's been a lucky year for Linux all around.


Some of the highlights.

X.org takes back X11
Windows virii, Longhorn delays.
Kernel 2.6
Tons of new Linux CE devices
And many new distro's

With all these developments Linux stands to take a bigger role in businesses and the home computing areas also.

First Blog

I'm somewhat new to blogging and probably about as late as a newcomer can be I guess.


A little background on my Linux usage. My first experience with Linux was with Redhat 5.2 I believe in 1998. I picked it up at BestBuy and at the time had no clue what Linux was about. I suspect I may have used slackware even earlier when I was 16 in 1994 when I ran a dos based BBS called "The Den" which was a Fidonet hub. So as you can see I started out with no known infection of Windows use at the time. My first PC purchase was a GateWay 2000 166mhz pentium with 128 megs of ram. This is what I used Redhat 5.2 on at that time. Of course then it was the latest and greatest so I ended up scrapping it back for windows 95 or 98. Until late 2000 I never bothered with it due to me only having one computer and being in the Army you really could not afford two. I exited the army in 2000 and began my career in telecommunications and now that I was making decent money I eventually ended up with 3 computers and was able to play with Linux on and off. It was not until 2003 that I kept a semi-perm installation of Linux on one of my machines. This is not to say I kept going back to Windows but that I kept trying many distros such as Gentoo, Redhat, Suse, Linspire, Slack, and FreeBSD. For the last 6 months I have been usign Linux 100% minus my 64bit athlon machine that is basically a expensive X-Box nowdays until the gaming on Linux improves where I can play the few MMO's I play on Linux. Yes I'm a avid user of Wine-X/Cedega but there are a few games I'm stuck on WindowsXP until they get new launchers.

Today's Linux at the house consists of 3 machines with full blown 100% installs, A laptop, and 2 desktop systems. The laptop is a distro morph of sorts and has yet to settle on one distro. I'm leaning on Fedora 1 for now since everything works with it. The other two run Linspire (yeah I can hear the eyes roll) which for what I do on these machines it's enough. It's a easy to install and very maintained distro of Debian that just works. For the fees I pay for the software repository I get guarrenteed bandwidth that is not consumed by the beta of the week and packages are passed through a minimum of QA to ensure anything I install from the repository does not break the system. This means I dont run the latest version of Firefox and Thunderbird but I'm with a version of Mozilla that I consider stable and usable for my needs. I dont have the time or patience to deal with the many freaky things that can and have gone wrong from updating a peice of software from Yum or Suse's Updater and unlike Suse who still have not figured out why they and not the "community" need to update packages, I get regular updates of features backported into certain software packages for my miniscule fee. On top of that that fee covers all the pc's using it in my house.

So enough of the Linspire fanboy act. I like many different distros but I truely love Linux. I'm sure I annoy plenty of people at work with my talk about it. And if I cant get them to give up Windows I can at least get them to try and accept free open source software such as Firefox and Thunderbird.


We'll that's enough for now I'll have updates on a semi daily basis I'm sure. Have a good day!