Linuxphile.org

I am an avid supporter of Google. It is with no surprise that I found myself submitting my email address for an invitation to Google's latest product, Google Voice. Approximately two weeks after applying, after a podcast begging for an invitation I did receive the invitation.

Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope is now available. The folks working on Ubuntu have focused this release on boot time and user experience with the integration of many application notifications into a single unobtrusive notification window.

My laptop is setup in a dual environment. I have both Windows XP and Ubuntu 8.04. I switch regularly between the two operating systems throughout the day as there are tools on both systems that I need tow ork with for my job. In doing this, however, I am often creating documents in both environments that I may need while working within the other operating system.

I have several laptop and desktop computers. Depending on where I am and how well prepared I am I could be working on any of the three laptops I own, or on my father's desktop, my brother's laptop, etc. Having these varied machines to work with has necessitated a review of how I author documents.

My desire for openness with my data has led me to the Toshiba Gigabeat MP3 player. The Gigabeat F series was shipped running a version of Linux. This version of the Gigabeat, however, still attempts to control media somewhat by requiring the use of the Toshiba software for transferring of songs.

The new version of Ubuntu, 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, was released two days ago. I have been waiting a while for this release of Ubuntu to check out the automatically configured eye-candy. While I was a bit disappointed with the "automatic" portion of the eye candy something production has occurred as a result of this fresh install of Ubuntu.

As I have mentioned in previous articles, I have purchased a couple Toshiba Gigabeat MP3 players. The original Gigabeat I purchased was the F40, my preferred device to this day as it runs Rockbox.

I recently purchased a broken Gigabeat S60 from Ebay. It was noted on the seller's page that the Gigabeat would boot, but with an error message. I didn't know what I was actually going to receive but had hopes that once the great folks at Rockbox ported their software to the S series Gigabeat I would be able to get the MP3 player working.

I am a huge fan of the Toshiba Gigabeat. I first discovered the Gigabeat while searching on Ebay for an MP3 player. I was attracted to the Toshiba Gigabeat because it already ran Linux. I showed the Gigabeat for sale on Ebay to my brother. He immediately bought an F40. After his arrived and I tinkered with it a bit I purchase a unit myself.

I had heard the rumors concerning Rockbox on the Gigabeat but made the assumption that it would take an investment in time to put Rockbox on my Gigabeat and so hesitated to do so because of lack of time. I was not happy with the MTP transfer protocol but again I did not have the time I imagined it would take to put Rockbox on the device.

We are not entirely certain why the swap partition was not added to the /etc/fstab, however, we noticed when running top that our swap space was showing up as 0k available, 0k used. This was a recent problem found on one of the web servers hosting http://forums.techguy.org. The web server had a fresh install of Fedora Core 4 but didn't appear to have any swap space. Following are the steps taken to correct the problem.

First we needed to determine if the swap partition existed. To do this we issued the following command as root:
fdisk -l
Disk /dev/hda: 10.2 GB, 10245537792 bytes